Exchange Online Backup

Run incremental backups of your Exchange Online accounts to ensure protection of the newest data while saving resources. Whatever the size of your infrastructure, Exchange Online users can be sending and receiving emails as often as every minute, and it is important to back up all the latest changes. Running full backups on a daily basis would be too resource-consuming. Incremental backups are a perfect alternative: the technology allows you to copy only the data that has changed since the last backup cycle. Such data is known as increments and can refer to the new Exchange Online folders, emails, attachments, contacts, calendar items and so on.

Make sure to create a well-planned backup retention scheme to cover all data versions that you might need. NAKIVO Backup & Replication allows you to keep up to 4,000 recovery points, rotating them on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis using the grandfather-father-son (GFS) scheme. Gaps in retention policy are a frequent cause for data loss. Make sure to keep both recent backups for instant restores and old backups for long-term retention. Finally, a comprehensive chain of Exchange Online backups enables you to easily retrieve data required for e-discovery, compliance or regulatory purposes.

The golden backup rule is to keep at least three copies of your data, that is, one production copy, one backup copy stored onsite and another copy stored on a different medium offsite. NAKIVO Backup & Replication allows you to create and store your Exchange Online backups on-premises. With the primary backup stored in your office, you gain full control of your data. Such an approach allows you to both speed up backup jobs and improve the recovery times. What’s more, you can perform the recovery even with a poor internet connection, which is not always possible with offsite backups.

Assign roles to users within your infrastructure to control their permissions and access levels. Role-based access control (RBAC) allows you to set up a user’s access to features and resources of NAKIVO Backup & Replication. You can create a role that would include view-only, run-only, full access or custom permissions. On the one hand, the functionality allows you to prevent unauthorized access and protect your data from internal threats. On the other hand, the feature enables you to effectively distribute tasks and delegate work to other users or tenants in a multi-tenant environment.

Create a schedule of your backup jobs to automate routine backup tasks. With all your backup jobs properly scheduled, you can minimize the need for manual intervention and reduce the risk of human error. You can create a schedule via the Calendar dashboard, where you can see all your previous, running and planned jobs. Make sure your backup jobs do not overlap. Job overlaps can lead to network congestion and disrupt the performance of other processes, especially in large-scale environments. Check the expected duration for each job and allow enough time for this job to complete.

Perform granular recovery to bring back an individual item, such as a mailbox folder (Inbox, Important, Drafts, Contacts, Calendar, among others) or individual emails, contact and calendar items. You don’t need to initiate a full-scale recovery of the entire Exchange Online account to access a specific item. Unlike full-scale recovery, granular recovery is nearly instant to complete. You can recover the object you need to either the original mailbox or to a location of your choice. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, all you need to do is to choose the recovery point, browse the contents, find the item you need and specify the location you want to recover the item to.