In our last article we looked at Office 365 Licensing, whether you’re using Office 365 or some other Cloud Service Provider, our view is that you should never rely on the cloud service provider to backup and protect your data (although some cloud service providers do provide backups as part of their service – typically you don’t get to choose the backup frequency or the data retention period. And in the event that you need to perform a restore, the restore options are generally limited).
At the end of the day, your data is the key to your business, equipment can be replaced, but your data will be unique to you. So if you lose your data, then the consequences could be catastrophic.
On the other hand, if you have good backups in place then any “data loss” will be an inconvenience rather than a ‘disaster’.
Data loss can occur due to:
- User error
- Malicious action
- e.g. ex-staff member decides to delete all or some of their mail just before they leave
- or some 3rd party manages to obtain remote access to a mailbox or OneDrive folder by guessing a user’s password and then decides to wreak havoc
- Data corruption
- virus
- or cloud provider snafu
So if you decide to implement Office 365, then you need to backup your Office 365 data:
- Mailboxes
- Public folders
- SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business data
- Teams data
There are several Office 365 backup solutions available.
One option is CodeTwo Backup for Office 365 which lets you perform full or incremental backups of selected Office 365 mailboxes and public folders, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business sites as well as Teams data.
CodeTwo Backup is relatively easy-to-use for a backup solution, bearing in mind that backup products should be the realm of an IT Admin rather than a user. CodeTwo provides good reporting / monitoring and is affordable.
Key features
- Backup Office 365 mailboxes
- Backup Office 365 public folders
- Backup SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business
- Backup Teams data
- Continuous incremental backup
- Backup on demand or scheduled automatic backups
- Centralised management from a single console
- Unlimited data retention and full control
- Option to export to PST and automatic archiving (although there are other archiving solutions that in our view are better)
- Granular recovery
- Restore full mailboxes
- Selected folders
- Or particular items only
- Browse backup versions, search for items
- Ability to restore data to a different destination – other than the original location
- The backed up data doesn’t have to be restored to the original location. You can recover items to mailboxes of different users.
Pricing
Like Office 365 licensing, CodeTwo uses an annual subscription model. Pricing is in USD.
The smallest license is for 10 mailboxes, which works out to $147 USD (or approx. $15 USD per mailbox per annum)
SharePoint / OneDrive data requires a license for every 10GB of data. So if you had 100GB of data, then that would be an additional 10 licenses. Although in that case the price per license reduces to $13.15 per license.
The CodeTwo price calculator can be found here – but if you’re considering placing an order we would appreciate it if you placed the order through us.