WIP…
In all cloud models – IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, user is always responsible for data. Microsoft is responsible for service, but data is something that client should take care of. Microsoft says “Microsoft 365 Backup helps your organization recover from data corruption events like ransomware attacks or accidental deletions”. That is exactly the point… Backup is a part of disaster recovery and business continuity concepts and should always be taken seriously. So let us go deeper in Microsoft’s “Microsoft 365 Backup ” offering.
Usually I do not retell what is already documented and explained by Microsoft itself or by other Microsoft 365 MVPs and gurus. What I do is I go beyond and share some insights from researches and real-world practices or at least highlight what seemed to me interesting or important.
SharePoint backup
What to backup
At the step 1 “Choose selection method” of the SharePoint backup policy creation, we have a choice:
“How do you want to select sites to back up?” and our options are:
- Upload a list of sites in a CSV file
- Using filters
- Select sites individually
First option – “Upload a list of sites in a CSV file” – you’d create a list of up to 50,000 sites as CSV file (example provided, but it’s just one column with sites Urls no header) and upload it.
Third option – “Select sites individually” is also straightforward . Good news – you can search (filter) sites by name or url.
Second option – “Using filters” seemed like the most promising, but
a) you can only use “Site name or URL contains” and “Site last modified”, and
b) Only existing sites that match these filters will be added to this policy. If new sites are created that match these filters, they won’t be added to the policy automatically. You can add or remove sites by setting the policy scope again later.
Thinking that first and third options are static by definition, that means the policy is not actually a policy, it’s just a master that produces a static SharePoint backup configuration.
Worth to highlight:
- Literally we can modify only what to include, we cannot modify “Retention”, i.e. how exactly sites are backed up. Microsoft says: “Backups are initially kept for 14 days. After 14 days, the latest backup from each week will be kept for one year after it was created.”
- Some sites within the scope might already be included in other policies. If so, they will not be added to this policy again.
- Each policy is a static backup configuration that includes static list of sites selected during the policy setup.
SharePoint backup limitations:
- CSV list cannot have more than 50,000 sites (but you can have more than one policy)
References
- Microsoft: Microsoft 365 backup adoption home page
- Microsoft: Microsoft 365 Backup documentation