SharePoint Online

How to Backup Office 365 Mailboxes with Altaro

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Backing up mailboxes in Exchange Online as a part of the Office 365 or Microsoft 365 suite is always a debated topic – some will argue that Microsoft have enough redundancy and backups in their own environments so you don’t need a third party solution and you’ll always be able to get your data back. However, this hasn’t been proven yet (thankfully) in a real world event where mailbox data has been lost by Microsoft. It also doesn’t cover scenarios where there’s outages, account problems or other connectivity problems that can delay your access to your cloud based data. Is it a risk each company will need to decide if it’s worth an investment into reducing.

Altaro asked me to have a look at their product – Altaro Office 365 Backup – to provide a quick run-through on setting it up and seeing what it does. Their solution is fully cloud based, so you don’t need any extra hardware to get going. You can set up a 30 day free trial here. Once signed up, here’s what to do:

After logging in from the link you’ll be emailed, you’ll be presented with this screen:

The wizard here will take you through the setup required, starting with a Company Name and your domain configured in Office 365 (which you can get from https://admin.microsoft.com/Adminportal/Home#/Domains) – I had to use my primary:

Next, you’ll need to grant access for Altaro to be able to access data in your tenant, which makes sense since you want them to back it up:

Following the links you’ll get the standard window advising you what permissions you’re granting and to whom:

If it worked, a successful message will show and you can go back to the setup wizard:

After doing this three times, you can go to the next step where you can choose which users to back up – which as it says, will be this data: “Office 365 User Backups consist of Emails, Calendars & Contacts within Mailboxes and Files stored within OneDrive accounts.”, then “SharePoint Backups consist of Files stored within SharePoint Document Libraries.”

If it all goes well, you’ll then get to the final screen showing a successful setup:

That’s it – backup has been set up. Of course your data won’t be in there instantly, the first backup happens over 24 hours, and then up to 4 times a day ongoing. You can choose if new users are automatically added to backup plans or not, which should turn this into a set and forget backup system.

Set and forget only works if you’re alerted around issues, which is possible in the Alert Settings – you can choose what sort of alerts you receive, such as if a backup job failed:

Restoring is also an easy process – for example if you want to restore an entire mailbox, the Mailbox Restore wizard will take you through the steps and ask where you want to restore – onto that user’s mailbox, another user’s mailbox, an Outlook PST file, or a ZIP file containing each mail item as an individual file:

You can also use the Granular Restore option, to search and restore particular items rather than entire mailboxes and accounts. The granular restore has the same options as the full restore for destinations, so there’s a lot of flexibility based on what you’re after:

If you can’t find what you’re looking for, the ‘Advanced Search’ option lets you define what you’re looking for:

Pricing for Office 365 Backup by Altaro is available at https://www.altaro.com/office-365-backup/#faqs and is a per user, per type (either mailbox or mailbox + OneDrive + SharePoint) model. This also includes 24/7 support and unlimited storage for backups.

After setting this up and trying out all the options, I’m confident in saying this is as good as you could hope for, from a turn-key solution. Setup is literally a few minutes, there’s no software to install anywhere and no infrastructure requirements. The data Altaro backs up is held forever (yes, infinite retention!) assuming you still have a valid subscription. The data is stored in Microsoft Azure, but only in West Europe at the time of writing – so if you have data sovereignty requirements, you’ll need to assess this.

Download your free 30-day trial of Altaro Office 365 Backup

Synology DiskStation Microsoft 365 Backup Review

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Synology sent me a new DiskStation to review after I’d acquired an older one myself to look at it’s ability to back up Microsoft 365 data (the updated name for Office 365). Being a Microsoft MVP in Office Apps and Services category, so I was very interested to see how it worked.

After reading up on and seeing that it was a completely free piece of software available as part of owning a DiskStation, I was hoping this would be a good solution at an incredibly low price – buy your DiskStation and disks, some time to set it up, and you’re done. To me, that’s already a very appealing offering, along with Synology having a good reputation for maintaining and supporting their hardware several years on – which was proved by the 7 year old DS1813+ I set up a few months ago.

I’ve left the new Intel-based DiskStation 1618+ – Quad Core CPU and 4GB RAM (expandable) running for about a month now, backing up my Microsoft 365 tenant’s data. I ticked ALL the options to see how it went. This tenant is just for me, so the data set is smaller than most tenants – but I do run a few live things through it like email and OneDrive. There’s also a little SharePoint Online data from Micrsoft 365 Groups and Teams I’ve played around with.

Here’s what the dashboard looks like now:

Some useful information there around what’s being backed up and how big it is. You might notice there’s a few errors on the summary. I drilled into those and each was because ‘The Microsoft Server is busy’, and a few minutes later it would try again successfully.

This is likely because I used a backup option to get incremental changes, rather than at a set time. Maybe I’m hitting it too much and getting blocked occasionally.

I know I’ve gotten ahead of myself here, so let’s go back to how to set this up. Assuming you have yourself a Synology DiskStation of some sort that supports ‘Active Backup for Office 365‘ – and which models are those? Here’s the list:

  • 20 series:FS6400, FS3600, FS3400, RS820RP+, RS820+, DS920+, DS720+, DS620slim, DS420+, SA3600, SA3400, SA3200D
  • 19 series:RS1619xs+, RS1219+, DS2419+, DS1819+, DS1019+, DVA3219
  • 18 series:FS1018, RS3618xs, RS2818RP+, RS2418RP+, RS2418+, RS818RP+, RS818+, DS3018xs, DS1618+, DS918+, DS718+, DS418play, DS218+
  • 17 series:FS3017, FS2017, RS18017xs+, RS4017xs+, RS3617xs+, RS3617RPxs, RS3617xs, DS3617xs, DS1817+, DS1517+
  • 16 series:RS18016xs+, RS2416RP+, RS2416+, DS916+, DS716+, DS716+II, DS416play, DS216+, DS216+II
  • 15 series:RS815RP+, RS815+, RC18015xs+, DS3615xs, DS2415+, DS1815+, DS1515+, DS415+
  • 14 series:RS3614xs+, RS3614RPxs, RS3614xs, RS2414RP+, RS2414+, RS814RP+, RS814+
  • 13 series:RS10613xs+, RS3413xs+, DS2413+, DS1813+, DS1513+, DS713+
  • 12 series:RS3412RPxs, RS3412xs, RS2212RP+, RS2212+, RS812RP+, RS812+, DS3612xs, DS1812+, DS1512+, DS712+, DS412+
  • 11 series:RS3411RPxs, RS3411xs, RS2211RP+, RS2211+, DS3611xs, DS2411+, DS1511+, DS411+, DS411+II

From the DiskStation desktop, open Package Center and follow these steps:

  • Find and click ‘install’ on the ‘Active Backup for Office 365’ package
  • Click ‘Activate’
  • Click ‘OK’
  • Choose the endpoint – for most it’s the default ‘Office 365’ option
  • Accept the very long list of permissions required using an admin account for your Microsoft 365 tenant
  • ‘Agree’
  • You need a shared folder to save the backups to – ‘Go to Control Panel’
  • Enter a name and description for the shared folder
  • Encypt the data if you like
  • ‘Next’
  • Make any user permission changes you like and press ‘OK’
  • Again choose the Office 365 option applicable to your tenant
  • Pick the user(s) you want to back up, and what data
  • Choose the ‘Site’ tab to select which SharePoint sites you want to back up
  • Press ‘OK’
  • Choose your backup schedule – I used Continuous
  • Review all the settings and click ‘Apply’

This was a very easy setup to do – I took screenshots of every step involved, but it barely needs an explanation for anyone who’s an admin of a Microsoft 365 Tenant.

The program will then go off and start backing up what you told it. The ‘Activities’ section of Active Backup for Office 365 will show any backups running, and you can also use the inbuilt ‘Resource Monitor’ to see upload/download speeds, disk utilization etc.

It’s also worth noting that the backup you created has an ‘account discovery’ option where it’ll find any new accounts created and automatically add them to the backup, which is great for not having to change backup settings each time you have a new user start.

Running a backup is great, but how do you restore the data? There’s a second app you’ll need, ‘Active Backup for Office 365 Portal’. Launching this will take you to a web interface where admins can browse all data, and users can browse just their own (user access can be disabled if you prefer).

On this web interface, you can then find the file(s) you want to restore, and restore them. You also get a nice timeline down the bottom so you can move backwards and forwards to see a snapshot of a certain time.

Although Mail, Calendar, Contact, and Site (SharePoint) support searching across all backups for names and contents, at the time of writing this isn’t possible for OneDrive backups. It’s worth being aware of this – if someone requests a file restore you’ll need to know exactly when from. I don’t see this as too much of an issue though, as OneDrive has great version control natively, and an automatic recycle bin – so you’d probably rely on the native solution for finding a file, but still it’s worth knowing this existing limitation.

That was the only slight negative I could find while testing. Everything else just worked, was quick to browse and restore, and incremental backups appeared to be on the DiskStation within several seconds after creating a new file in OneDrive.

Again, this is an incredibly cheap Office 365 backup solution. Some may question if you need to back up Office 365 at all. You could set up infinite retention against all content, so why take a backup? To me it’s a definite grey area, and partly depends how much you value the data. Microsoft may never lose your data, but will it be available 100% of the time? What if that important document is in your OneDrive and hadn’t synced down, and there was an outage? We’ve seen a few outages lately, including ones that have broken authentication – your data is still there, but you can’t get to it. In that scenario, having a local copy of something time sensitive could be worth it. Considering the relative low cost of buying a Synolgoy DiskStation – your disks are probably going to cost more than the unit itself, I consider it a pretty easy sell.

OneDrive for Business – Turn Off ‘Allow Editing’ By Default

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Update 21st March 2019

You can now find these settings in the OneDrive Admin Center (Preview) at https://admin.onedrive.com and that’s a clearer experience.

Update 16th April 2020

As the SharePoint Admin Center has been updated, here’s the area to find the view/edit choice:

Original Post

Every organisation has their own requirements and standards. For mine, I see a risk when the default action of sharing a document via OneDrive for Business is the ability to ‘Allow editing’ of any document sent out. It’s worse because that option is hidden behind the main popup when sharing a file, and you don’t actually see that you’re giving ‘modify’ access rather than ‘read only’:

OneDrive for Business default sharing popup
OneDrive for Business ‘Allow editing’ on by default

There is a way to change this default behavior though, and it’s not in the OneDrive admin center.

Instead, you’ll need to head to the SharePoint admin center (since the backend of OneDrive is SharePoint Online, this makes some sense). From here, go into ‘sharing’ and there’s an option around ‘Default link permissions’. You can change this to ‘View’ rather than ‘Edit’:

SharePoint admin center

The change was immediate from my testing, as soon as I went to share another file via OneDrive for Business, the ‘Allow editing’ option was unticked. This is only changing the default too, someone can still decide they want to allow editing and tick the box.

It’s worth considering what you should have as your default. The new versioning in OneDrive/SharePoint Online is really good, and will let a user easily roll back to a previous version of a document if something accidentally gets changed – but will your users be aware if something does change? It’s possible to set up an alert, but it’s a bit tedious: http://itgroove.net/brainlitter/2016/05/16/creating-alerts-documents-new-onedrive-business/

Hope this helps anyone considering rolling out OneDrive, or wants to start allowing external sharing.

Connect to all Office 365 services via PowerShell

Posted on by Adam Fowler

I found this great TechNet article and wanted to share:

Connect to all Office 365 services in a single Windows PowerShell window

It’s a greatly described article about how to connect to each Office 365 service – MSOL itself, Exchange Online, Skype For Business, SharePoint Online and the Compliance Center.

If you go through the article, you can set up a script to prompt you once for Office 365 administrator credentials, and connect to each service for a one stop shop on managing your Office 365 environment from PowerShell.

One catch (which is mentioned in the article) is that you’ll need to run PowerShell in Administrator mode, or you won’t be able to import modules. You’ll see an error like:

The specified module 'Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.Online.PowerShell' was not loaded because no valid module file was found in any directory.

If you aren’t sure if you’re in Administrator or User mode, the default path prompted in the PowerShell window will be “PS C:\users\username>” for User mode, and “PS C:\Windows\system32>” for Administrator mode (along with the word “Administrator” in the PowerShell window title.

I’m only new to Office 365, but I’ve found the GUI via the web for user management rather basic – I can’t do simple tasks such as search for users on a specific domain, then add them to a group. PowerShell is absolutely necessary if you want to manage Office 365.