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List of all SharePoint Online Objects backed up

  • 15 February 2022
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Userlevel 4
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Is here a way of obtaining a ‘list/ dump’ of every SharePoint o365 object backed up over  a 5 year period

It would likely be 10s of millions of lines long

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Best answer by Chris Hollis 16 February 2022, 03:41

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6 replies

Userlevel 7
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Hey @YYZ,

To clarify what you are looking for - do you mean export a list of objects to a text file? like name and location or something?

Or actually do a mass restore out of place of all those objects?

Userlevel 6
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@YYZ 

Not that I’m aware of.. what exactly is the business case here?

Assuming the jobs within the 5 year period are still on storage, we could report on the size of data being protected / validate the client job success.. but getting a granular extract of every item protected successfully I don’t believe is possible.

If the data has aged from storage (e.g. you only have the last 4 years worth of data, not 5), you definitely won’t be able to report on it. 

 

Userlevel 4
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@Damian Andre @Chris Hollis 

This would not be an actual restore - 

Just a ‘prediction restore’

 

The use case is:

  1. the o365 Data has been backed up
  2. But much of the data in o365 needs to be deleted (due to space, financial and other reasons and the fact that most of the data is dumped there and never used or read again
  3. If a user needs an old ‘file’, they can request it from IT Services and the file will be restored from the on-Prem backups
  4. The reason for the list was a means of handing the o365 team ‘something’ to check against
  5. Some files may not have been backed up and an o365 deletion would remove all traces of the data
  6. One method is to have the users delete the top ‘1000 largest unused files’
    1. and then its easy for them to use the restore console to check these (and also list their existence in the command center  console (and sort by size)
  7. In Summary
    1. The list is to provide a definitive ‘This is what's in the backup  system at this point in time
    2. a restore to a ‘null’ device might do the ‘trick’
    3. an actual restore might generate log files that could be stitched together indicating what has been restored
Userlevel 7
Badge +23

Looping back on this one.  I heard back from a few developers who confirmed there is no easy way to collect this list.

A suggested method was to browse for a restore and copy and paste the contents into Excel.  Not an ideal manner, but a possible one.

Userlevel 4
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Thanks Mike for having a look at this one

Userlevel 7
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anytime.  Wish we had a better answer, but unfortunately we only have the one option.