Protecting Microsoft 365 mailboxes
This section is valid for on-premises deployments of Acronis Cyber Protect. If you are using a cloud deployment, refer to https://www.acronis.com/support/documentation/CyberProtectionService/#protecting-microsoft-365-data.html.
For more information on the licensing options, see Acronis Cyber Protect for Microsoft 365 Licensing.
Why back up Microsoft 365 mailboxes?
Even though Microsoft 365 is a cloud service, regular backups provide an additional layer of protection from user errors and intentional malicious actions. You can recover deleted items from a backup even after the Microsoft 365 retention period has expired. Also, you can keep a local copy of the Microsoft 365 mailboxes if it is required by a regulatory compliance.
Recovery
The following items can be recovered from a mailbox backup:
- Mailboxes
- Email folders
- Email messages
- Calendar events
- Tasks
- Contacts
- Journal entries
- Notes
You can use search to locate the items.
Recovery can be performed to Microsoft 365 or to a live Exchange Server.
When a mailbox is recovered to an existing Microsoft 365 mailbox, the existing items with matching IDs are overwritten. When a mailbox is recovered to an existing Exchange Server mailbox, the existing items are kept intact. The recovered items are placed next to them.
Recovery of mailbox items does not overwrite anything. Instead, the full path to a mailbox item is recreated in the target folder.
Limitations
- Applying a protection plan to more than 500 mailboxes may cause backup performance degradation. To protect a large number of mailboxes, create several protection plans and schedule them to run at different times.
- Archive mailboxes (In-Place Archive) cannot be backed up.
- A mailbox backup includes only folders visible to users. The Recoverable items folder and its subfolders (Deletions, Versions, Purges, Audits, DiscoveryHold, Calendar Logging) are not included in a mailbox backup.
- Recovery to a new Microsoft 365 mailbox is not possible. You must first create a new Microsoft 365 user manually, and then recover items to this user's mailbox.
- Recovery to a different Microsoft 365 organization is not supported.
- Some item types or properties supported by Microsoft 365 may not be supported by Exchange Server. They will be skipped during recovery to Exchange Server.