Failure to backup SP site

[mlange]

I'm going to start off by saying I am by no means a SharePoint guy, so if this is something obvious, my bad. I've started backing up our SP Online environment and everything processes just fine except this one site:

7/23/2019 1:16:26 AM :: Failed to process site: https://company.sharepoint.com/sites/TestPlanner. Cannot contact site at the specified URL https://company.sharepoint.com/sites/TestPlanner. Access to this Web site has been blocked. Please contact the administrator to resolve this problem.

Poking around in the SPO admin center it shows that this site is locked. Doing more research and running some PS commands it shows that the Lock State is NoAccess. I'm guessing that VBO cannot access this even though it's doing impersonation? If that's the case, will it work if the site is put into ReadOnly?

[Mike Resseler]

Hi mlange,

It looks indeed like a security problem. Can you check if the O365 account has site admin rights on that specific site? Normally it should have, but it is possible that it got removed by someone.

[mlange]

The O365 account does have admin rights on it. I've unlocked the site to see if it works normally during tonight's run.

[Mike Resseler]

Hi Mlange,
Any results?

[mlange]

Unlocking the site has allowed it to backup normally. Is VBO supposed to be able to backup locked sites?

[Mike Resseler]

It is not actually. When the SP is in locked state, the idea is to not make any changes so API access to them is locked also. (Does make sense since you only want it read-only).

[Mike Resseler]

Hmmm, I need to change my above response. VBO CAN backup a locked site if the organization account (VBO's service account) is already added to the site BEFORE it was locked. Because when we want to add that account to the locked site, to be able to backup the data, it cannot be read-only. Mea Culpa.

[mlange]

Ah ok. Turns out this site in particular was just a test site, as indicated by the name, so it's not really all that important. But, it's good to work out the details now instead of later when it's important. Thanks Mike!

[dasfliege]

I received the same error for a few personal sites. Found out, that the cause was, that those are peronal sites from deleted users that still are visible in the "Deleted users" tab in the admin center. However, there are other deleted users whos personal sites do not throw such errors in the backup. I actually don't really understand why:
- Veeam is trying to backup personal sites from deleted users
- Errors are only thrown for three out of 15 users that have been deleted at the same day