Microsoft 365 Backup

Microsoft 365 Backup provides business continuity and peace of mind. It offers fast backups, low recovery times and frequencies, and helps keep your data secure within the trusted Microsoft 365 network boundary while providing strong access controls. Get more details on why you may want to adopt Microsoft 365 Backup and recognized Microsoft 365 Backup Storage partner solutions in the Microsoft 365 Backup guide.

Find more information about Microsoft 365 Backup, including how to set up Microsoft 365 Backup and create backup policies.

Microsoft 365 Backup Storage is the API platform that powers Microsoft 365 Backup. You can purchase the native Microsoft 365 Backup solution from Microsoft directly, or if you prefer, purchase an ISV application that’s built on the Microsoft 365 Backup Storage platform. In either case, you’ll gain speed, recoverability, and other benefits.

Microsoft 365 Backup is sold as a standalone pay-as-you-go solution with no license requirements, aside from needing a SharePoint or Exchange Online license for the source data that’s being protected.
For a detailed overview of the cost and charge model, go to the Pricing for Microsoft 365 Backup page. As of July 31, 2024, the price is $0.15 per GB per month for Backup data storage.

The restore point frequency (also known as the recovery point objective), describes how frequently backups are captured. For Exchange, the restore point frequency is every 10 minutes for the full prior year. For OneDrive and SharePoint, the restore point frequency is every 10 minutes for the previous 14 days—reducing to a weekly frequency from 14 days to 365 days prior.

Today, only files stored in SharePoint sites for a Teams channel are backed up if those sites are in your Microsoft 365 Backup protection policy. Team chats or any other content stored on Teams servers are not currently protected. We plan to provide this added security in the future.

Backups are currently retained for a year from the time an item was changed or a snapshot was taken. In the future, we plan to introduce a way to retain backups for a longer or shorter time period.

Backup retention is governed solely by the policies defined in the Microsoft 365 Backup tool. Any retention/deletion policies defined anywhere outside the Backup tool will not impact the retention of content in the Backup tool. This protects the backups from being deleted in cases of an accidental or maliciously defined retention policy.

Backups are stored in multiple geographic locations to provide strong data resiliency and durability. This data is guaranteed to live within the geographical locations dictated by a customer's geo-residency requirements—a key benefit for some location-sensitive customers.

Government Community Cloud (GCC) release timelines are in progress but not yet confirmed.