Taking a backup is just the start, it’s always been the insurance policy for your data or infrastructure, that doesn’t change when it comes to SaaS based workloads. Why do we need to protect Microsoft Office 365? Well because it’s your data, Microsoft are not backing that up.

I will argue with anyone that thinks a litigation hold is a backup, the same as I would argue with anyone that thinks a snapshot is a backup..

If you right click on your organisation or you select the Explore button from the top ribbon then you can then start looking into the restore options around Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.

Exchange Online Restore

Recovering from a backup directly back into your Office 365 Exchange Online inbox is one of the cool recovery options with the Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange, which is the same tool used to perform this within Veeam Backup & Replication for on premises exchange systems.

The ability to restore a whole mailbox, multiple mailboxes, individual folders and items back into Exchange Online in a very seamless and fast manner is probably the most important but the ability to export those same items out into pst files gives another angle to the recovery engine here.

Sharepoint Online Restore

In a similar way to Exchange Online people are moving their document sharing and document libraries away from on premises SharePoint systems they want to offload that infrastructure, operating system and application configuration and maintenance to someone else i.e Microsoft. But they should also be considering their backup of that data and read up on what Microsoft has covered for them.

From a restore point of view the Veeam Explorer for SharePoint allows for the granular recovery of Document Libraries, Lists, documents and list items but also your whole SharePoint site.

OneDrive for Business Restore

Those familiar with Veeam Backup & Replication may have come across the two explorers that I have just mentioned but OneDrive for Business is not something you roll out on premises or there has not been that non SaaS based approach here for us to have to worry about from a backup point of view.

The explorer for OneDrive for Business gives you the ability to recover complete OneDrive or particular folders and documents. It also has the ability to copy those items as well to a different user.

This link to the Veeam User Guide covers off the Veeam Explorers in much more detail – https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/explorers/explorers_introduction.html?ver=95u4