CodeTwo Backup for Office 365
- Back up Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams data
- Perform point-in-time restoration of individual items
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
- How does CodeTwo Backup work?
The program is a desktop application that securely connects to your Microsoft 365 (Office 365) tenant via Microsoft Graph and the Office 365 SharePoint Online API. All connections use Modern Authentication (OAuth) to protect your credentials while granting access to your resources in Exchange Online and SharePoint Online.
CodeTwo Backup reads the contents of users' mailboxes, public folders, as well as SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business sites and creates their copy that you can keep on local drives or in the cloud storage (if the program is installed on a cloud-hosted virtual machine). In order to connect to your server, certain requirements need to be fulfilled.
The administrator sets up backup jobs by configuring criteria in the program. There is an option to specify what data should be backed up once the backup job is launched, and where the backup copies of mailboxes should be stored.
The program can perform a one-time backup job or backup data in cycles. During the first cycle, a complete backup copy is created. It means that all items meeting the criteria defined in the job configuration are saved to the specified storage. During subsequent backup cycles, incremental backup copies are created. During the incremental backups, the program scans mailboxes in search of changes in items or newly arrived items and backs them up upon detection.
The administrator can choose to restore entire mailboxes, selected folders or single items. When restoring SharePoint data, the administrator has options to select entire site collections and team sites or individual sites, libraries, folders and items. The program also allows restoring Microsoft 365 users’ personal sites in OneDrive for Business service and individual documents. Data can be restored to the original location, or a different folder/mailbox/site or even another Microsoft 365 tenant.
- How is the program licensed?
CodeTwo Backup is free to use.
- Can I use the freeware version of CodeTwo Backup commercially?
Yes, the program can be used for commercial purposes.
- Where do I install it?
CodeTwo Backup can be installed on any machine (physical or virtual) that is connected to the Internet. Detailed information on system requirements can be found in the user's manual.
- Do you provide storage for backup copies?
No.
The program’s main purpose is to give you the ability to create offline backup copies of users’ Microsoft 365 (Office 365) mailboxes. Therefore, it is designed as a desktop application that saves data to local storages/hard drives. This storage model reflects the widespread legal requirement concerning data archiving, backup and recovery, according to which archived/backed up data can’t be stored by a 3rd party cloud service.
- Can I backup mailboxes to a cloud storage?
No, at least not directly from an on-premises environment.
The current version of CodeTwo Backup for Office 365 only lets you create storages locally. However, you can still keep your backup storage in the cloud by installing the program on a cloud-hosted virtual machine (e.g. Azure VM). Learn more
- What are the storage size requirements?
The storage size requirements are determined by the amount of data that you need to backup. The program itself doesn’t impose any storage size limits. Used and free space can be easily verified at any time in the CodeTwo Backup user’s interface.
- What is backed up by the program?
CodeTwo Backup for Office 365 backs up Exchange Online user mailboxes, shared mailboxes, resource (room and equipment) mailboxes, public folders, as well as SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business sites. All typical Exchange Online mailbox folder types and item types are supported. The program also can be used to create copies of Teams data that resides within SharePoint team sites and OneDrive for Business.
For more details on supported scenarios, see our user’s manual.
- Can I export mailbox data to PST files?
Yes, you can. To do this, you have to first use CodeTwo Backup for Office 365 to create a backup of the mailboxes you want to export to PST files. Then, use the Archive to PST option on the backup storage that was created in the previous step. This, in effect, will result in creating PST files for the respective mailboxes.
What's more, you can run the program to cyclically archive your backed-up mailboxes to PST files. Thanks to the possibility of setting up an archive retention policy, you may decide how many recent PST archive files are to be kept on hard disks.
- Can I backup mailbox items within a certain time range?
Yes.
CodeTwo Backup lets you choose time filters for mailbox items while configuring the backup job. For instance, it lets you decide whether to backup items older or not older than a specified number of days.
- Are there any item size or speed limits imposed by the program?
No.
The program uses Microsoft Graph to connect to the source Microsoft 365 (Office 365) tenant and to copy the mailbox contents. It also uses Office 365 SharePoint Online API to connect to SharePoint Online. The speed of data transfer can be determined by many factors, independent from the application itself, e.g. network bandwidth, Microsoft Graph throttling, etc.
What is more, the program doesn’t put any limits on the size of backed up items.
- What are the general requirements to use the program?
The general system requirements to use CodeTwo Backup can be found in the user's manual. The program can be installed on any Windows computer, starting from Windows 10 / Windows Server 2016. In order to be able to run any jobs in the program, the computer has to be connected to the Internet (broadband connection is recommended), and the account used to sign in to the Microsoft 365 (Office 365) tenant has to have global admin or privileged role admin rights.
- Are Outlook rules backed up as well?
No.
Outlook rules are stored on the mail client’s side. CodeTwo Backup backs up mailbox and public folders data only.
- Can users work with their mailboxes, OneDrive and SharePoint sites during the backup process?
- Can I back up mailboxes to a shared network drive/storage?
- Why do I need CodeTwo Backup for Office 365?
The program will help you create backup copies of an important mailbox and public folders data as well as SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business sites. Additionally, the fact that backup copies can be stored locally allows for unlimited offline access to data stored in those copies.
All backups are managed centrally, which means that you can create and manage backup and restore jobs from one workstation.
CodeTwo Backup for Office 365 is also helpful when you need to comply with the law and keep the mailbox data to make it available for legal actions. When it is necessary, you can search for certain items and, if they were deleted, recover them.
Thanks to that, you will also be ensured that no important emails or other types of data are damaged or lost forever – no matter whether it was deleted by accident or it was caused by malicious behavior, you will be able to retrieve every single item.
- Does the program support MFA?
Yes. You can use credentials of an admin account with multi-factor authentication (MFA) enabled when configuring a connection to Exchange Online or SharePoint Online.
