Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 Highly Recommended

Our business needed granular restore functionality of our Microsoft 365 products. In particular, we have hosted mailboxes with Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams data. Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 handles all of these extremely effectively.

It is a standalone product unrelated to Veeam Backup and Recovery, so you don't need to have any investment in the Veeam product line to take advantage of it. Both local and object storage-based backup repositories are supported. Once your initial backup is completed, all future backups are done incrementally in a very fast and efficient manner. Due to the efficient storage of backup data, I have point in time backups going back several years since we started using the product with surprisingly little storage used. We can granularly restore individual items using the explorers for Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams. The restoration options are very flexible, for instance we can restore one or more messages from an Exchange mailbox to the original mailbox, PST file, individual msg file, or email it to someone.

The only difficulty someone may have in setting it up is the object storage, but there is excellent documentation to walk you through it.

We're very happy with it.

Once we migrated our mail from our own Exchange server to Exchange Online, it was clear we needed a way to ensure we had control of our data. We already used Veeam for backup of onsite servers and infrastructure. When looking at the feature set and getting a demo setup, we saw it was immediately the solution we wanted and just worked.

We don't allow users to directly restore their own files, so we don't take advantage of this feature currently. I can see where this might be extremely helpful in limiting interaction with users when they can restore files themselves.

We sometimes need to restore files directly to disk to look at them without having them go back to the original location. In other circumstances, we want them to be restored exactly where they originally resided. Having this flexibility based on the circumstances is very beneficial to us. Also having the option to export to PST from backup is very useful if a mailbox was deleted and not archived for some reason.

The speed of backups utilizing minimal bandwidth is a great feature for us. We have a limited amount of bandwidth and were concerned with the overhead during backups. We are able to throttle the backup speed so we don't overwhelm our connection, but in addition, the incremental backups are very efficient and effective. The granular restores work very well and help us to rapidly recover individual items in ways that are flexible to our needs for each instance.