M365 Storage Usage in Commvault Cloud SaaS

Hi @Aris ,

Please find the below doc which will be helpful in understanding the office 365 backup structure.

https://docs.metallic.io/metallic/exchange_online.html

https://docs.metallic.io/metallic/best_practices_for_reducing_storage_usage_in_o365.html

Backups You Can Perform

• Forever incremental backups

When You Can Perform Backups

• On a schedule: The server plan that you assign manages scheduled backups

  For new customers who onboard after April 19, 2024, two schedules are created for each Office 365 Server Plan during the onboarding process. Existing customers will continue to use the same single schedule. The two new schedules work as follows:

  • Schedule 1: A backup job for items that do not meet SLA runs once every 8 hours. The job commits after 32 hours. All items that were never backed up or backed-up items that are older than 30 days are included in the backup.

  • Schedule 2: A backup job for items that meet SLA but were not recently backed up runs once very 8 hours. The job commits after 22 hours. All items that are more than 17 hours old and less than 30 days old are included in the backup.

• On demand: You can perform on-demand backups at any time

The manual schedule can’t be added. The auto-discovery happens every 24 hours, it can be done manually as well to update the mailboxes.

Thank you, Navneet. I have seen that documentation, but couldn’t find information about full backup. Can I conclude that full backup is not available for O365? And, it is the same for any other software.

If there is no full backup, what are alternative for customers who ask for full/weekly backup that include all mailboxes (including new mailboxes that can be added automatically into backup job)?

Data will be growing constantly, since each day they are receiving and sending new e-mails. Data in backups covers both active and deleted data. 

Since this is more archiving than backup solution usually “forever incremental” backups are in place, more about the topic here - Forever Incremental Backups Explained | NAKIVO

Usually there’s no need to run “full” backups here. In Office 365 plans, retention is file/items based, not job based. Meaning, everything will be kept forever, but you can control how long deleted or modified files/items are kept in backups. 

As for the dynamic mailbox allocation to backup, you can use AD / security groups. 

Adding AD Groups to the Exchange Online Backup Content So That All Users Are Automatically Backed Up (metallic.io)