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Overview of Veritas SaaS Backup for Office 365

  • December 9, 2020
  • 7 min read
IT and Virtualization Consultant. Romain is specializing in Microsoft technologies such as Hyper-V, System Center, storage, networking, and MS Azure. He is a Microsoft MVP and MCSE in Server Infrastructure and Private Cloud.
IT and Virtualization Consultant. Romain is specializing in Microsoft technologies such as Hyper-V, System Center, storage, networking, and MS Azure. He is a Microsoft MVP and MCSE in Server Infrastructure and Private Cloud.

A lot of data can be stored in Office 365 through services such as Exchange Online, OneDrive, Sharepoint, or even Microsoft Teams (which leverages Sharepoint). Microsoft is not responsible if data is lost or corrupted in their Services, so the protection of data located in Office 365 is your responsibility. Similar to data stored On-Premises, data located in Office 365 has to be protected with a backup solution. That is the same story as with an On-Premises scenario: you may need to restore data in case of ransomware or unintentional deletion and so on.

A lot of backup solutions for O365 are available on the market, like Veeam, Rubrik, or Veritas. In this topic, I’ll do an overview of Veritas Saas Backup for O365 because I find this product interesting. Firstly, you don’t have to deploy backup infrastructure because it comes as software-as-a-service (SaaS). Data is stored and encrypted in Veritas Datacenter located in Denmark; it’s GDPR compliant. Secondly, the business model is based on subscription as Office 365. So, each time you buy an Office 365 license, you just have to do the same on the Veritas side. The subscription includes backup for Exchange Online, Onedrive, Sharepoint, Teams, and a few other services. The price is 4$ per user for unlimited storage.

Backup for Office 365

Configure Veritas Saas Backup for O365

To connect to the Veritas solution, you can browse to this URL: https://eu.saasbackup.veritas.com/

When you connect for the first time, you get the following popup to choose which service you want to backup:

Cloud service

Then you have to specify a connector name and click on next. Just after that, a new window is opened to ask for your service account credentials. And … that’s all, you are ready to backup.

Create new Office connector

Once the connector is added, you have a few options such as the services you want to backup, the retention period and Azure AD users and/or groups you want to backup. There is an option to backup automatically all O365 users.

Configurations for Office 365

From there, the backup process will be done regularly, and you just have to know how to restore your data.

Restore O365 data from Veritas Saas Backup for O365

From the dashboard, you get information about the connector, the last backup job, and the data size:

Saas Backup dashboard

When you open the connector, you see the protected O365 services. From there you can restore an entire service if you wish. Usually, we need a finer-grained restore target. So you can click on each service or users to get more details.

Protected O365 services

In the following screenshot, I opened the user called Romain Serre. From there I can restore OneDrive files, emails, contact,s or Calendar.

User's files

I have parsed the OneDrive service until finding a file I want to restore. To restore something, you just have to click on suspension points and select restore. You can download the restored file or replace the existing file in production.

Restore the file

We can do the same thing for E-mail:

E-mails list

If you go back to Teams service and you open a Teams, you can restore files, Channel, and even conversations.

Restore files, Channel, and even conversations

In Sharepoint service, you can restore an entire site if you wish, but you can also parse the site to restore item per item:

Restore item per item

Conclusion

Veritas Saas Backup for O365 is an easy tool to backup O365 data. You don’t need to deploy infrastructure for backup and the service is based on a subscription model. The price is more than adequate for the unlimited data package. I recommend this product to my customers a lot because the time-to-service is short and the administrative effort is low.

Found Romain’s article helpful? Looking for a reliable, high-performance, and cost-effective shared storage solution for your production cluster?
Dmytro Malynka
Dmytro Malynka StarWind Virtual SAN Product Manager
We’ve got you covered! StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) is specifically designed to provide highly-available shared storage for Hyper-V, vSphere, and KVM clusters. With StarWind VSAN, simplicity is key: utilize the local disks of your hypervisor hosts and create shared HA storage for your VMs. Interested in learning more? Book a short StarWind VSAN demo now and see it in action!