As I understand it, there are basically two possibilities regarding the Office 365 plan retention: Infinite and Retain deleted items for X period of time.
Infinite: All items (e.g., emails, sites, folders) remain in the backups forever.
Retain deleted items for X period: Only data that has been deleted from the source (M365) is removed from the backups after the given period. All other "live" (non-deleted) data remains in the backup forever, just like with the infinite option.
Am I correct in thinking that once Office 365 data is backed up, it stays in the storage libraries forever, with the only exception being deleted data (when that option is selected)?
Even though Server Plans have their own retention settings, do they affect Office 365 data? It seems to me that M365 data follows an "incremental forever" logic and there is no way for retention to delete "live" data from the storage.
Please confirm my understanding or correct me if I am mistaken.
Thanks in advance for your contributions!
Best answer by Paul G
Hi @drPhil,
Yes, you are correct in thinking that office 365 data stays in storage unless it is deleted. Deleted can be individual items that are deleted by the user but also when a user is deleted from office 365, all their content is marked as deleted. Even though it is stored in a server plan, server plan retention is not applied to the backups of office 365 applications and only follow item based retention.
This is entirely how it should be as all backed up data minus deleted items should be the same as the live data on office 365. The deleted items retention only adds additional retention on deleted data. You would not want to delete "live" data from your backups as it would result in a situation where the backup data browse would not mirror the live data.
If you would set you retention of deleted items to 0 days (not sure if that is possible), your total backup size of office 365 should theoretically mirror the size that is reported in office 365 itself. There is a caveat in that Commvault can only reduce storage use when all data in a job has aged. So reducing storage usage will only really work if you combine this with archive/cleanup settings in Office 365 to ensure live data does not stay in office 365 forever.
I hope this clears things up for you. Do let me know if you still have questions. I am happy to answer them.
Yes, you are correct in thinking that office 365 data stays in storage unless it is deleted. Deleted can be individual items that are deleted by the user but also when a user is deleted from office 365, all their content is marked as deleted. Even though it is stored in a server plan, server plan retention is not applied to the backups of office 365 applications and only follow item based retention.
This is entirely how it should be as all backed up data minus deleted items should be the same as the live data on office 365. The deleted items retention only adds additional retention on deleted data. You would not want to delete "live" data from your backups as it would result in a situation where the backup data browse would not mirror the live data.
If you would set you retention of deleted items to 0 days (not sure if that is possible), your total backup size of office 365 should theoretically mirror the size that is reported in office 365 itself. There is a caveat in that Commvault can only reduce storage use when all data in a job has aged. So reducing storage usage will only really work if you combine this with archive/cleanup settings in Office 365 to ensure live data does not stay in office 365 forever.
I hope this clears things up for you. Do let me know if you still have questions. I am happy to answer them.
