Hi,
I am just wondering for 0365 backups, Exchange and Teams etc, is there a point for having them go off to tape if they are seen as forever incrementals?
Thanks
Answer
365 Going to Tape
- Novice
Best answer by goomba
“The only benefit I can see of keeping a copy of all jobs on tape would be in case the disk storage was to fail. But even if that was so, you would hope that there was some redundancy on the disk storage to recover anyway.”
To be honest thats a fairly poor response. There are many reasons to still have tape copies.
- air gap your backups.
- long term retention offsite
- fires
- disasters (yes a replicated DR site helps with this)
- and probabably a dozen other reasons.
We’re still to fully understand how to age O365 backups without running manual process which all seem very risky.
+5- Vaulter
Thank you for your question.
This is correct that the Office 365 agents are incremental forever.
You can use “Tape out” for these jobs using another copy. However you cannot use “cycles” and you cannot restore items directly from tape. If you had to restore from tapes you would first have to restore all jobs back from tape to disk if the primary disk storage was lost for example.
We recommend for the Office 365 agents to use disk based storage. The only benefit I can see of keeping a copy of all jobs on tape would be in case the disk storage was to fail. But even if that was so, you would hope that there was some redundancy on the disk storage to recover anyway.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
+1- Novice
- Answer
“The only benefit I can see of keeping a copy of all jobs on tape would be in case the disk storage was to fail. But even if that was so, you would hope that there was some redundancy on the disk storage to recover anyway.”
To be honest thats a fairly poor response. There are many reasons to still have tape copies.
- air gap your backups.
- long term retention offsite
- fires
- disasters (yes a replicated DR site helps with this)
- and probabably a dozen other reasons.
We’re still to fully understand how to age O365 backups without running manual process which all seem very risky.
+5- Vaulter
Yes you are right those benefits of using tape you listed are also very valid!
The Office 365 agents are incremental forever backups and use “Item Level” backup on these agents. This means the agents do not follow storage policy retention but instead use the retention policies instead. For example this is Exchange retention policy:
https://documentation.commvault.com/11.25/expert/28891_creating_exchange_retention_policies.html
When the items in the backup meet retention they are then deleted from the index and over time get pruned off the storage.
+22- Vaulter
There are many reasons to still have tape copies.
- air gap your backups.
- long term retention offsite
- fires
- disasters (yes a replicated DR site helps with this)
- and probabably a dozen other reasons.
Agreed, but will note that we’re seeing that customers prefer to use cloud storage for these use cases today. Cloud gives you way more flexibility, especially for DR. Vault lock type technologies help with immutability and there are several cool/cold storage options to match your budget vs recovery time.
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