Best Way to Backing up OneDrive for Business Data

[DrMacintosh]

Hello all, I manage Office 365 for a small consulting company. We are currently using about 1.5TB of data, mostly photos, word docks, and spreadsheets all stored in various SharePoint Document Libraries. SharePoint estimates we will consume our current 3TB plan in 6 months at the current rate of data usage. We are able to offload data to local storage as old projects wrap up and buisness years conclude, so our OneDrive space is fine as long as we offload data eventually. 

 

While OneDrive/SharePoint offer many tools for recovering data and allegedly have good backup systems, that does not help us if OneDrive goes down or we can't access it for whatever reason. While the risk of data loss is low, I'd still like to have a local backup of all our data so I'm looking for the best way to go about doing that. 

 

Currently, there is no method (that I am aware of) of incrementally backing up OneDrive/SharePoint data. All that can be done is to manually download a whole library and copy it. So at this moment, every backup is going to consume 1.5TB of disk space. That gives us 8 backups at whatever frequency we determine on a single 12TB drive, which costs ~$300. Keep in mind, some data we must retain for about 5 years, but we would like to retain all data for as long as possible. 

 

My current plan is to put together an inexpensive desktop with enough HDD storage to store all our SharePoint Libraries locally, then copy that data to a NAS where it will sit. What NAS I should order/build is up in the air. As are a lot of things like:

• How often should we make a backup? Every month? Twice a month? 
• How many bays is enough? A NAS gets pretty expensive real quick and so do drives.
• Does the NAS need to be in RAID since we're backing up an already pretty reliable service? RAID seems like it would complicate decommissioning drives when we still want to store the data on those drives. 
• When do LTO tape drives start to make sense? 

 

Boss won't be happy about the bill for a project like this, but as the company grows in the future this becomes serious and I'd like to have that security. 

 

I realize this is kinda intense, but any input would be great!

[leadeater]

26 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

Currently, there is no method (that I am aware of) of incrementally backing up OneDrive/SharePoint data.

Backup software does this, just have to decide if you are prepared to pay for such a supported product.

 

Software wise Veeam does a great job at Office 365 backups, I use Commvault however that can be a little more complicated to setup. There are other options in the market.

 

Anyway Office 365 supports APIs to gather changed data between last backup, between time frames, so you can do incremental backups.

 

Currently we backup to on-prem storage:

• 200TB of OneDrive
• 41TB SharePoint Online
• 54TB Exchange Online

Your data sizes are small so this won't be too much of a problem for you however just so you are aware Microsoft have very strict egress QoS so getting data out is a challenge. All backup software manage this using multiple "Applications" or Service Accounts as the QoS rules are per these so to increase the egress data rates you have to scale these out and round robin between them, again backup software will manage this process automatically once setup as per their documentation etc. I don't expect this to be a problem for you.

 

26 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

While OneDrive/SharePoint offer many tools for recovering data and allegedly have good backup systems, that does not help us if OneDrive goes down or we can't access it for whatever reason.

Their systems are only good for availability and not backup and data retention. Been hit with OneDrive bug in the past where user OneDrive just went blank, no data and nothing in Microsoft's delete items retention either. Put in place legal hold for 2 years across the tenant which helps when it happened again but to actually restore all the data was a pain in the ass and required PowerShell script to get it done, web interface and manually select files is not sufficient for thousands of files.

 

Basically the service is great, data protection overall is good but if it goes wrong recoverability options are not great when it fall outside of the normal expected problems.

 

26 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

When do LTO tape drives start to make sense? 

Only when you have backup requirement that will use many tapes per retention point, aka not your situation. Use a archival cloud solution.

 

Cloud to Cloud data protection offers a really good balance and satisfies moving the data off platform protecting you from platform issues.

 

26 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

Boss won't be happy about the bill for a project like this, but as the company grows in the future this becomes serious and I'd like to have that security. 

The per user pricing of backup software for Office 365 is surprisingly good so don't pass these up as an option if you assume it will be too costly. They'll also save you a ton of time and use storage space more efficiently along with scaling better with growth. They will also allow you to configure multiple data retention copies so you can have data locally and data moved in to a cloud archive provider

[DrMacintosh]

11 minutes ago, leadeater said:

The per user pricing of backup software for Office 365 is surprisingly good so don't pass these up as an option if you assume it will be too costly.

I'll have to look into the pricing options available for products like this. I appreciate the response. The only thing I'm not a huge fan of is that Microsoft can implement changes that break the functionality of solutions like that, it also puts the task of the backup in someone elses hands. Paying me who knows how many hours to download our libraries and copy them costs money and consumes time, but it will work every time. 

 

I'll definitely look into it as an option though. I also just realized that since the majority of our data is static, it's probably safe to delete redundant data. Lets say we have 12 monthly backups for the buisness year, backup #12 should be the most complete, so I could probably delete in-between months that didn't change much. The vast majority of our data is not mission critical and maybe only gets referenced for a follow up email a few times a year. 

 

Again, I appreciate your reply. 

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, DrMacintosh said:

I'll have to look into the pricing options available for products like this. I appreciate the response. The only thing I'm not a huge fan of is that Microsoft can implement changes that break the functionality of solutions like that, it also puts the task of the backup in someone elses hands. Paying me who knows how many hours to download our libraries and copy them costs money and consumes time, but it will work every time. 

That's a non issue, backup software like this has never been affected by any changes Microsoft makes and they actually work together so it does not happen. So long as you keep the software up to date it will work every time. I've never had any issue in the last 5 years with this, even with the backup software not updated for 6+ months.

 

Also it's not like it's out of your hands, you still have to setup the software, setup the schedules, setup data placement rules etc. And it's still on you to monitor it and make sure it's working.

 

There are free tools for copying data out of the relevant services though so you can do it all using these and a bit of effort to streamline the process.

[Thomas4]

Heres an article listing 10 free alternatives to OneDrive

https://fixthephoto.com/best-onedrive-alternatives.html

 

Me, I use OwnCloud Online

https://owncloud.com/pricing/

With a Free 14 Day Trial

[DrMacintosh]

1 minute ago, Thomas4 said:

Heres an article listing 10 free alternatives to OneDrive

https://fixthephoto.com/best-onedrive-alternatives.html

 

Me, I use OwnCloud Online

https://owncloud.com/pricing/

With a Free 14 Day Trial

Thanks, but Office 365 is a lot more than just OneDrive. There isn't another platform out there that offers everything in an integrated solution like Office 365. 

[boryslav]

You are right Office 365 is ucomparable because of the provided offers and features. Recently, for such a projects we always use a backup tool called Gs Richcopy 360, it can integrates and backup from/to O365 , Onedrive for business and Sharepoint online, just set and forget!