To back up and recover Office 365 mailboxes, you must be assigned the global administrator role in Microsoft Office 365 and have the Acronis Backup 12.5 Agent for Office 365 installed on a Windows machine that is connected to the Internet. Once completed, you simply sign in as a global administrator to Microsoft Office 365, select the mailboxes that you want to back up, and click Backup. To select a backup location, click Where to back up, select a previously used, predefined backup location, or click Add location to specify a new backup location.

You can then choose to back up to cloud storage, a local or network folder, Network File Storage (NFS), a Secure Zone, or a Shared File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) location. With Acronis Backup 12.5 Advanced, you can also back up to a storage node or tape device. By default, backups are performed daily, Monday to Friday. You can select the time to run the backup and can schedule a backup to run by events, instead of by time. For more information on how to back up Office 365 mailboxes, refer to the Acronis Knowledge Base or view the Acronis Backup 12.5 Demo Video: Backing up your Office 365 mailboxes.

With Acronis Backup 12.5, the scheduling parameters depend on the backup destination. For example, if you are backing up to cloud storage, backups are performed daily — Monday to Friday — by default. You can select the time to run the backup and you can easily change the backup frequency.

You can also change the backup schedule to run by events instead of by time. When setting up a schedule for a backup plan, you can select the event and the backup will be launched as soon as the event occurs. These events include: upon X time since last backup, when a user logs onto the system, when a user logs off the system, on the system startup, on the system shutdown, and on Windows Event Log event.

The first backup is full, which means that it is the most time-consuming. All subsequent backups are incremental and take significantly less time. You can choose to encrypt backups and can specify additional scheduling options, such as the backup start conditions, setting a date range for when the schedule is effective, and so on. For more information on this topic, refer to the Acronis Knowledge Base.

It is easy to recover an email that a user deletes using Acronis Backup 12.5. Start by clicking Microsoft Office 365 in the Acronis console, select the mailbox that originally contained the items that you want to recover, and then click Recovery. You can search mailboxes by name and if the entire mailbox was deleted, you can select it on the Backups tab, and then click Show backups. Select a recovery point and click Recover > Email messages. You can now search for the email that you want to recover by subject, sender, recipient, or date. When an email message is selected, you can click Show content to view its contents, including attachments. You can also click the name of an attached file to download it.

When an email message is selected, you can send it as an email, which is sent from the administrator account's email address. To select folders, click the “recover folders" icon and click Recover, specify the target mailbox, and click Start recovery. For more information on this topic, refer to the Acronis Knowledge Base or watch the Acronis Backup 12.5 Demo Video: Recovering your Office 365 items