Implement Microsoft 365 Backup (Preview)
Business continuity assurance is a top-of-mind concern for many companies. Microsoft 365 Backup is a pay-as-you-go consumption-based service that delivers business continuity peace of mind by providing reliable data backup and restoration capabilities.
Note
Microsoft 365 Backup (Preview) is now available worldwide in all commercial cloud environments. General availability is expected to be mid-2024. Product features and pricing are subject to change.
When evaluating a backup and restore offering, what really matters isn't solely the backup, but the ability to restore your data to a healthy state quickly when you need to do so. Recovering large volumes of content is difficult when copying data at a scale from a remote, air-gapped location. It can also be very harmful should it require weeks or even months to return your business to a running state.
In cases of a ransomware attack that encrypts large swaths of your data, or instances of an internal accidental or malicious data deletion or overwrite event, you must be able to get your business back to a healthy state as soon as possible. This functionality is what the Microsoft 365 Backup product offers, both through the Microsoft 365 admin center, and through partner applications built on the Microsoft 365 Backup Storage platform.
Applications built on top of the Microsoft 365 Backup Storage platform deliver the following benefits regardless of the size or scale of the protected tenant:
- Fast backup within hours
- Fast restore within hours (see performance targets later in this article)
- Full SharePoint site and OneDrive account restore fidelity, meaning the site and OneDrive are restored to their exact state at specific prior points in time via a rollback operation
- In the future, roll forward granular file-level restores in OneDrive and SharePoint
- Full Exchange mailbox item restores or granular item restores using search
- Consolidated security and compliance domain management
Microsoft and partner offerings
This training unit outlines the Microsoft 365 Backup offering available in the Microsoft 365 admin center. However, keep in mind that Microsoft is partnering with many independent software vendors (ISVs) to provide differentiated versions of their applications integrated with the Microsoft 365 Backup Storage platform—all providing the same underlying performance value proposition for your Microsoft 365 data.
With a partner application, operation of the Microsoft 365 Backup tool is managed and paid for entirely through the partner's application. Those applications can provide a single pane of glass for all of your data estates that require backups. They might also provide other enhanced experiences or workflows.
Microsoft 365 Backup pricing model
The Microsoft 365 Backup service is a pay-as-you-go consumption-based service. The preview list price is $0.15/GB/month of protected content.
When you purchase the Microsoft 365 Backup service, the price of the service is based on the content size of the data that's backed up. The content size of backed up data is based on the following guidelines:
- Cumulative backup size of the mailboxes, SharePoint sites, and OneDrive accounts being protected.
- The size of OneDrive accounts and SharePoint sites are the size of the live OneDrive accounts and SharePoint sites as displayed in the live sites’ usage reports.
- Mailboxes are the size of the user's mailbox plus their online archives plus deleted items held for Backup.
- Deleted content in each user’s Recycle Bin and second stage Recycle Bin (also known as Site Collection Recycle Bin).
Note
Microsoft doesn't charge for restore points or size of restores. Although Azure is being used to process the payments, there are no additional Azure API or storage costs beyond the Microsoft 365 Backup usage charges mentioned above.
The charge for your Microsoft 365 Backup service covers 365 days from when the data is added to backup protection.
As an example, if you have a site under protection that is currently 1 GB for the first month, you'll be charged 1 GB of Backup usage. If you delete content in that site such that it's now only 0.5 GB, your next monthly bill will still be for 1 GB since the backup tool is retaining that deleted content for a year. After a year when the backup of that deleted content expires, the 0.5 GB being retained for backup purposes will no longer be charged for Backup.
Note
These prices are subject to change when the product becomes generally available. A partner application integrated with Microsoft 365 Backup storage might charge a different rate for their service.
Pricing calculator
The Microsoft 365 Backup pricing calculator is a tool that helps you estimate the amount of backup storage and the costs that you'll incur to protect and back up your Microsoft 365 data.
Note
The tool isn't intended to provide an exact prediction of your backup consumption. Rather, it's designed to provide an estimate based on your current usage reports that are forecasted for the next 24 months based on historical trends.
The Microsoft 365 Backup pricing calculator, when calculating the storage required for each month, takes into consideration the following heuristics:
- How much storage is typically added (or removed) from a protection unit during the month. For example, if the protection unit was a SharePoint site, how much storage on average is added (or removed) from a SharePoint site during the month due to documents being added (or deleted).
- How many new protection units for a service type are typically added (or removed) every month. For example, if the service type is Exchange mailboxes, how many new mailboxes are added (or deleted) on average each month.
- The largest amount of storage required for the previous 12 months.
Additional reading. For more information on the pricing model and pricing calculator, see Pricing model for Microsoft 365 Backup (Preview).
Microsoft 365 Backup architecture
Microsoft 365 Backup provides ultra-fast recovery from common business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) scenarios like ransomware or accidental/malicious employee content overwrite/deletion. Other BCDR scenario protections are also built directly into the service. For example, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange Online provide replicated copies of your data across geographically disparate datacenters. This design automatically protects against physical disasters by providing automatic failover to live active copies seamlessly without the need for end customer intervention.
Microsoft's backups are protected from malicious overwrites because OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange use Append-Only storage. This design means that SharePoint can only add new content blobs and can never change old ones until they're permanently deleted. The Exchange items are backed up in an immutable manner and can't be accessed by a client process (such as Outlook, OWA, or MFCMAPI). This process ensures that items can't be changed or corrupted after an initial save, protecting against attackers that try to corrupt old versions. For More information about the built-in service and data resiliency, see SharePoint and OneDrive data resiliency in Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online data resiliency in Microsoft 365.
Key architectural features of Microsoft 365 Backup include:
- Data never leaves the Microsoft 365 data trust boundary or the geographic locations of your current data residency.
- The backups are immutable unless expressly deleted by the Backup tool admin via product offboarding.
- OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange have multiple physically redundant copies of your data to protect against physical disasters.
Backup policy performance
Creating a new protection policy initiates the process of backing up selected SharePoint sites, OneDrive accounts, and Exchange mailboxes. Once you submit a request to activate a valid protection policy, it takes on average up to 60 minutes to process and another 60 minutes to create restore points.
Restore points are physically created in the service as soon as the tool confirms the policy is activated, even if those restore points take some extra time to become visible in the restore tool.
Restoration performance
Restoration performance dictates your recovery time objection, or the time it might take for you to restore a healthy state of your data and thus recover from a data destruction event. For full OneDrive account and SharePoint site restorations, the fastest recovery occurs when choosing in-place restore rather a new URL restore. Additionally, choosing one of the recommended “faster” restore points presented in the restore workflow UI yields the quickest recovery results.
All restore points and restores to new URLs are relatively fast, but same URL restores using a recommended “faster” restore point typically yield better results. The Exchange Online restore workflow doesn't have or require the “faster” restore points.
It takes on average less than one hour for the first full site or account protection unit to be restored when a new restore session is initiated. After the first site or account is restored in a session, the remaining protection units should complete in relatively fast succession.
The following table summarizes expected performance for a normally distributed tenant, including tenants of large size and scale.
| Scenario | Restore of all protection units complete |
|---|---|
| 1,000 accounts, sites, or mailboxes (30-GB average size) |
Less than 12 hours |
Note
A protection unit is a OneDrive account, SharePoint site, or Exchange mailbox.