Office 365 - Overview

Using this Protected Item type may incur additional charges. Please see the pricing information in your billing portal for details.

The Microsoft Office 365 Protected Item type backs up data from your Office 365 cloud account. The backup job runs on a local device and uses Magnus Box client-side encryption, compression, and deduplication to store data efficiently.

The following Office 365 services are supported:

• Exchange Online
  • Mailbox (email)
  • Calendar
  • Contacts
• SharePoint Online
  • Sites
  • Lists
  • Pages
• OneDrive for Business (Document Library)
• Microsoft Teams (Files)

Note: Microsoft is responsible for the availability of the Office 365 online service and for meeting its SLA guarantees, and offers first-party features such as Retention Policy and Litigation Hold. You back up your Office 365 cloud account for data safety and redundancy, resilience to tampering, misconfiguration, and accidental loss, legal compliance, unified reporting alongside your other backup sources, and easy single-item restore.

Supported items and restore options

Exchange Online

• Mailbox (email): backed up; restore to local device and back to the cloud. Supported for active users and shared mailboxes. Not supported: guest users, deleted users, Discovery mailboxes, Archive mailboxes, Journal mailboxes, and Outlook group mailboxes.
• Calendar: backed up; restore to local device (JSON format) and back to the cloud.
• Contacts: backed up; restore to local device (JSON format) and back to the cloud.
• Tasks: not supported.

SharePoint Online

• Sites: backed up; restore to local device. Individual restore of lists, documents, and pages is supported.
• Lists: backed up; restore to local device and back to the cloud.
• Pages: backed up; restore to local device.

OneDrive for Business

• Document Library: backed up; restore to local device and back to the cloud. Items appear under Documents in the associated SharePoint site.

Microsoft Teams

• Files: backed up; restore to local device and back to the cloud. Items appear under Documents in the associated SharePoint site.
• Chat, Calendar, Meetings, and Calls: not supported.

Selecting mailboxes and sites

Use the edit (pencil) button in the desktop app to choose which mailboxes and sites are backed up. You can back up all mailboxes and sites, only selected ones, or all except selected ones. The first dialog shows your current selection. Click the plus button to open a second dialog that lists users and sites from the Office 365 server, with a search field to filter for a known user or site.

When selecting users, the dialog also shows Azure Active Directory groups of user accounts. If you select a group, all mailboxes for user accounts belonging to that group are backed up. Azure AD groups are supported, but Outlook groups are not. Available mailboxes include active users (as shown in the Office 365 Admin Center) and shared mailboxes. A shared mailbox is counted as a full separate mailbox for billing, regardless of how many accounts have access to it.

The Protected Item configuration is also available remotely through the Management Console while the device is online with a live connection.

For more detail, see Office 365 - Configuring Selections.

Performance considerations

The backup job uses the Microsoft Office 365 API to read data from the cloud, so a large amount of data is downloaded to the local device. The job uses Office 365 server-side delta change APIs for high-performance incremental backups of mailbox, calendar, contacts, OneDrive files, and Teams files. The Office 365 API also applies rate limiting per mailbox, and mailboxes are backed up in parallel. For full detail, see Office 365 - Performance Considerations.

Restore

Select the files to restore. Different columns are displayed depending on the type of item being browsed. You can preview an email before restoring it from the right-click menu; the preview shows rich HTML content when present, the From, To, and Subject header fields, attachment information, and embedded images. For restore formats and cloud-restore behavior, see Office 365 - Restore.

Backing up multiple Office 365 organizations

You can back up multiple Office 365 organizations centrally from a single account. Represent each Office 365 organization as its own Protected Item, so you can manage one backup worker centrally and set any schedule frequency you need. A typical setup is to provision a VM on Azure, install the Magnus Box client on it, and create one Protected Item for each target Office 365 organization. You can monitor the worker VM's CPU and memory and scale it, or split the load across multiple worker VMs, and send job report emails to different recipients for different Protected Items.