How Backup & Restore your Office 365 with Altaro < ProVirtualzone

In this series of Office 365 backup, today, I will talk about How Backup & Restore your Office 365 with Altaro. This is my first blog post about Altaro products.

With Altaro Office 365 backup, we can backup and recovery services for Office 365 mailboxes and files stored in OneDrive and SharePoint through a multi-tenant online console.

Altaro Office 365 Backup is a Cloud Management backup tool with centralized online management.

Hassle-free backups
Easily restore items that are misplaced, deleted, damaged or destroyed
Robust, secure and unlimited storage
Centralized management
Unbeatable value

What Office365 features does Altaro Office 365 Backup have?

To use Altaro Office 365 Backup, you need to have a subscription.

The minimum is 10 mailboxes for an annual subscription. The subscription can be scale to tens of thousands of mailboxes.

Your subscription includes backup, storage, support, and access to our cloud management console for centralized management of all your company’s Office 365 mailboxes. You can subscribe for one or more years. More details about subscriptions HERE.

Examples of pricing:

10 Mailbox only – 1 year = €33 per month
10 Mailbox, OneDrive & SharePoint – 1 year = €39.42 per month

For more mailboxes and different year subscriptions, check this Pricing Calculator.

How to start?

First, you need to create a Backup Office 365 account on the Altaro website HERE.

Fill the information, and you will create your account for Altaro Office 365 backup trial for 30 days.

Next connect to Altaro Office 365 Portal: https://eu-office365.manage.altaro.com

Enter the credentials that you created above to enter the portal.

Since we want to use Altaro Backup Office 365, select Office 365 Backup – Cloud Management Console.

First, we need to link Altaro Office 365 Backup to your Office 365 account.

Enter your organization name (not mandatory to use a name that you have in your Office 365 account) and add your Office 365 organization eq: xpto.onmicrosoft.com.

For this case, my test Office 365 account is vmwarehome.onmicrosoft.com.

Next, you need to give permissions to Altaro Office 365 Backup to your email accounts.

There are three types of accesses that Altaro Office 365 Backup needs.

Access to Altaro Office 365 Backup to be able to revoke access to Altaro Applications. This means if you wish to stop Altaro Office 365 Backup to backup this organization.
Access to Altaro Office 365 Backup create new Applications in your Organization. This means, it is temporary and is used only once during the configuration wizard.
Access to Altaro Office 365 Backup to Backup and Restore your Office 365 mailboxes, OneDrive and Sharepoint. Meaning, this is the main permissions to allow Altaro Office 365 to Backup and Restore all objects in your Office 365 account/organization.

To start, click in the first option.

The process starts.

1 – Access to Altaro Office 365 Backup to be able to revoke access to Altaro Applications.

1. Provide login with an Office 365 administrator account.
2. Allow and accept access to the first option.
3. After access is allowed and access is created, close the information page.

2 – Access to Altaro Office 365 Backup create new Applications in your Organization.

3 – Access to Altaro Office 365 Backup to Backup and Restore your Office 365 mailboxes, OneDrive, and Sharepoint.

After, all accesses are created and allowed, click next to start select objects to backup.

Next, select which user you want to backup. You can select all, or select different users to backup.

In this case, I will backup all users.

Note: Option to automatically add new users to backup is enabled.

Next, you have the option to select your SharePoint infrastructure. Backup all documents in SharePoint or select the ones you want to backup.

In this example, since I do not want to backup SharePoint at this stage, I will select the option Configure SharePoint Later.

In step 5, all is configured and you click Finish and backup are set to start backup your Office 365 with Altaro Office 365 Backup.

Note: As we can check above, you cannot schedule your backups. Altaro Office 365 Backup will Backup incrementally and perform up to a maximum of four times a day.

After you finish the configuration, you will receive an email from Altaro Office 365 Backup with the information about the mailboxes that were added to the backup.

This is an example:

How to start Backups?

Here we see the main Dashboard and Office 365 Organizations for your Altaro Office 365 Backup.

In this board, you will see all Office 365 Organizations that you may have added to Altaro Office 365 Backup.

Note: If you pass the mouse arrow on the icons you can get the information for each option it the organization.

As we can see in the above options, automatic backup is enabled for all mailboxes accounts and also for new ones, and Share Point backup is disabled.

Next, go to the Backups and Mailboxes & OneDrive tab and you will have all the information about the backups on the organization and mailboxes accounts.

As we can see in the information boxes, all mailboxes are initially in the Queued for the first backup. OneDrive is automatically backup after we create the organization.

Clicking in the last icon you have access to the full Backup menu for the mailbox. Here you can start a backup immediately, disable or even restore files from that mailbox.

After 24h, I double-check my backup, and this the information we can now see in the Dashboard.

Clicking in the backup icon bar, you have all the information about the backups of Mailboxes, OneDrive, and SharePoint.

In this case, 3 backups were created for Mailboxes, and one for the OneDrive (SharePoint backups is disabled in this example). In this option, you can always check the state of your backups.

If you go to Backups and Mailboxes & OneDrive you will see more details for each mailbox.

If you click the icon menu in the mailbox you have the menu for Mailboxes and OneDrive. Here you can disable backups, restore, or remove the mailbox from the subscription and free one user subscription license (don’t forget that license is per user).

As we can notice in the above configuration for your Office 365 account, to backups your mailboxes you don’t need to do anything. Just add your organization to the Altaro Office 365 Backup and Altaro tool will take care of all backup and schedule.

You do not need to have a backup repository to store your backups. Your Office 365 backups are automatically saved to Altaro’s secure cloud backup location hosted on Microsoft Azure Infrastructure, which is located in the Netherlands, West Europe region.

All backup data that is transferred is also fully encrypted using AES-256.

By using this option, you save money in your infrastructure and also maintaining your backup infrastructure.

How to Restore?

Again, Restore is very easy and straightforward as the backup option.

Restore full Mailbox (all emails, Calendar Items, and Contacts).

In this option we can restore:

- Restore to the Same Mailbox
- Restore to a Different Mailbox
- Restore to PST File
- Restore to ZIP Archive

For this case, we will only use a full restore to the same mailbox.

Go to the Restore tab and Mailbox. Select the organization that has the mailbox you want to restore and click Next.

Select the Mailbox and click Next.

Next, select the backup restore point you want to restore and click Next.

Next, select the type of Restore you want. As stated above, we will select the full restore to the same mailbox.

Next, select the location for the restore. Since I want to go to the original mailbox, I enable the option “Restore Emails back to their original folders”. If you do not enable this option the restore is stored in a folder with the restore point name(data and time).

Note: If any copy of the objects exists, restore will create a second copy.

Next, for security reasons you need to provide your Altaro portal credentials/

Next, restore is authorized, and it starts.

Go to Main Dashboard, and you will see in the activity the restore process.

And your restore is done, and your Outlook account is recovered with all items.

Note: The different options like Different location, Restore to PST File, Restore to ZIP Archive, the process is the same.

Restore single items from a Mailbox

To start a restore for an item in a Mailbox, you need to use the Granular Restore option.

Go to the Granular Restore tab and select your organization.

Next, select the type of item you want to restore(for this case is an email) and select the Mailbox account.

Next, select the folder and the item/email you want to restore and click in Restore select items.

Note: If you click in the icon Preview, you can preview the email you want to restore. With this option, you make sure you are restoring the right email.

For security reasons, you need again to provide Altaro Portal credentials, and then the restore process starts.

In Main Dashboard check the restore process activity.

In the end, email is restored, and you can log in to your Outlook account and check if you have your email again in your Mailbox.

With the restore of an Office 365 item, we finish this How Backup & Restore your Office 365 with Altaro. The first blog post about Altaro products.

Final thoughts:

The Altaro Office 365 Backup tool is excellent and very easy to use. With a few clicks, you have your Office 365 account linked to your Altaro Office 365 Backup portal and can start backup your Office 365.

As I stated in the beginning, Altaro Office 365 Backup is a Cloud Management backup tool used through a multi-tenant online console. No local backup infrastructure is needed, no hardware, no install software, and no Storage Backup Repository are needed.

Using their unlimited Microsoft Azure Backup repository, costumers never have to worry about storage space or extending their Storage backup repository when the repository is getting low on space. This is very useful and with a fraction of the price, very affordable.

Two final comments about the product.

First, costumer doesn’t have the option to schedule their backups. This is a restriction that some costumers may need extra options on their backups. Some companies may need more than four backups a day, and others may only need one. Or they had email accounts that don’t need so many backups and others that need more. Even with a maximum backup allowed, costumers should have this option.

Second, not possible to backup to the external backup repository. Local or a customer Cloud account(AWS or Azure as an example). There are organizations that want to have control of their data and do not want their data to be stored in third-party entities; even they are secure.

As an example, if it was a German company, it was not allowed to store data outside the EU. In this case, no issue since Altaro Azure Backup repository is in the Netherlands. We know that Office 365 and Azure are both Microsoft and are stored in the same “umbrella,” but is still a third party account. But this is just an example.

So I think Altaro should think in the future provide these options to costumers that want their data On-premises or their Cloud infrastructure and more control on their schedule backups.

For more information about Altaro and their main products click in the products of the following links:

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