Microsoft Teams Backup
Microsoft Teams Backup
Microsoft Teams Backup
Brien Posey
© 2020 Conversational Geek
Conversational Microsoft Teams Backup
Published by Conversational Geek® Inc.
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Publisher Acknowledgments
All of the folks responsible for the creation of this guide:
Authors: Brien Posey
Project Editor: Pete Roythorne
Copy Editor: Pete Roythorne
Content Reviewers: Edward Watson
Denisa Dan
Russ Kercher
Note from the Author
Hi, I’m Brien. For those of you who don’t know me, I am a long-
time Conversational Geek author, and 19-time Microsoft MVP.
My professional background is in both IT and commercial
astronautics. It’s an odd combination for sure. I sometimes find
myself setting up virtual machines one day, and being strapped
into a space capsule the next day (seriously). Thankfully, my
friends at Conversational Geek have embraced my unorthodox
(dare I say eccentric) career choices and have allowed me to
author books on subjects ranging from AWS to rocket science.
The other reason why I believe that Office 365 backups didn’t
catch on initially, was because there really wasn’t a good way
to back it up. After all, the backup software of the time was
purely designed to back up resources residing on premises. The
cloud was brand-new, and the backup vendors and providers
had not yet caught up.
In any case, history has conclusively demonstrated that it is
extraordinarily important to back up your resources residing
within the Office 365 cloud – especially if you are using Teams.
In fact, there are at least six different reasons why Office 365
backups are so important.
The good news is that Microsoft does give you a way of getting
back data that was deleted accidentally. If a user accidentally
deletes a file from within OneDrive, they may be able to use
the OneDrive Recycle Bin to get their file back. Similarly, if a
user accidentally deletes an email message that they need,
they can recover it from the Deleted Items folder.
As helpful as these types of mechanisms may be, they aren’t
perfect. First, end users might not even realize that those
mechanisms exist. Second, Office 365 only retains deleted
items for so long. Once that period of time expires, the item is
permanently deleted and there is no way of getting it back
without restoring a backup. It’s also worth noting that the
recovery mechanisms that Microsoft provides might not be of
any use if a file was accidentally overwritten rather than being
deleted.
Teams Recovery
When it comes to having the ability to restore Microsoft Teams
data, there are three main things that you need to be thinking
about – The Recovery Point Objective (RPO), the Recovery
Time Objective (RTO), and backup application support.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) refers to the
frequency with which backups are made,
while Recovery Time Objective refers to how
long it takes to perform a restoration.
For those who might not be familiar with the term, eDiscovery
refers to the practice of locating all documents and other data
that have been the subject of a subpoena.
Searching data
With that in mind, consider how a good backup application can
perform these same tasks. Even though a backup application
was never designed to act as an eDiscovery tool, a good backup
application will likely include a search interface that allows an
administrator to search for the data that has been backed up.
As such, an administrator could conceivably use such an
interface to perform eDiscovery within the context of a backup.
Even if the native Office 365 search interface is limited in its
scope, a search tool that is integrated into an Office 365 /
Teams backup should be able to locate any data within the
backup, even if that data is not something that would normally
be surfaced by the native Office 365 search tool.
Data Immutability
Many modern backup solutions also support data immutability
within the backup. Data immutability has become increasingly
important as a ransomware defense mechanism. Some
ransomware is specifically designed to target an organization’s
backups. The idea is that if the ransomware is able to encrypt
the backups then the organization will have no choice but to
pay the ransom. Consequently, backup vendors are
increasingly supporting data immutability as a way of
preventing backup data from being modified by ransomware.
The same immutability can also serve to protect data if a legal
hold is issued.
Sharing data
The last step in the eDiscovery process is that of exporting and
sharing data. A backup application is perfect for this purpose.
You could simply select the documents that you want to
restore, and then specify where you want to restore them to.
The restoration process is essentially identical to the process
that eDiscovery engines use for exporting data. One thing that
makes a backup tool different from the native eDiscovery
engine, however, is that a good backup tool can help you to
export data in whatever format makes the most sense. This
might include .ZIP format, .PST format, or perhaps something
else.
Finally, make sure that the product that you choose is storage
agnostic and designed to work in hybrid environments. Ideally,
the software should make almost no distinction between your
servers running on premises, and the resources that you are
protecting in the Office 365 cloud, nor should it care what type
of storage the data is physically residing on. You should be able
to use the same interface and techniques to back up both
environments, and you should be able to restore data from
one environment to the other environment if necessary.