Altaro Office 365 Backup Review

How important to take an Office 365 backup? Are you thinking Microsoft provides full backup features with Office 365 subscription?

Any organization’s data, email, and files are important, so it is always advisable to take backup of your emails or data. The same is the case you are using Office 365 in your organization.

Microsoft does take backup but for a limited period. For example, Microsoft takes a backup of SharePoint every 12 hours and keeps it for 14 days. So, Microsoft’s inbuilt backup options are not enough.

Altaro Office 365 Backup

Altaro provides Office 365 backup option. You can take backup of your Office 365 mailboxes as well as your files in OneDrive and SharePoint document libraries.

The backup will be done through an Online console and stored in Altaro’s Microsoft Azure infrastructure.

According to the functionality, it is available in below two ways:

1. Altaro Office 365 Backup
2. Altaro Office 365 Backup for MSPs (Partners)

Features of Altaro Office 365 Backup

Now we can see the features of Altaro Office 365 Backup tool.

• Easily take a backup of your organization’s mailboxes, files stored in OneDrive, or in SharePoint document libraries. The backup will be stored in a secure cloud backup location, Altaro’s Microsoft Azure infrastructure. The backups can be stored for an indefinite period of time.
• It allows taking backup up to 4 times a day. And you can also manually enable/disable backup options.
• Now only emails it also allows you to take a backup of attachments, calendars, and contacts also. And you can restore entire mailboxes as well as selected mail items, such as restoring back to the same mailbox.
• The backup tool also allows restoring files within OneDrive and SharePoint Document Libraries to a downloadable ZIP archive or another OneDrive Account or SharePoint Document Library.
• It allows you to select the Office 365 users whose email boxes you want to take backup as well as it also allows you to auto-provision new users to be added automatically.
• You do not need to spend anything for the storage server, rather, it will be stored in the Altaro secured cloud backup location.
• You will have a centralized backup management interface. You can easily search, manage, monitor your mailboxes or files. All the backups are searchable as well as you can browse with advanced filters.
• In the case of MSPs, you can manage and monitor all their customers’ Office 365 backups through Altaro’s centralized, multi-tenant online management console.
• Your organization’s backup data is secured through AES 256-bit encryption, it also supports two-factor authentication (2FA).
• The tool allows account activity audit, you can review various actions performed by your team members like enabling or disabling mailboxes, OneDrive, and SharePoint backups; browsing of backup data, and restore requests. You can also export the audit report.
• Within the tool, you can also provide the access rights to selected user accounts within the team who can browse and restore organization data.
• They also have 24/7 support and access to the management console.
• In the case of MSPs, also you can choose to give your customers access to their account on the Altaro Cloud Management Console so that they can monitor, browse, and restore their own backup data.

Pricing

They provide flexible pricing options to use the tool.

It allows you to take a license for mailbox only or mailbox, OneDrive, and SharePoint Online backup options.

The subscription you can take for one year, two years, or three years.

You can check and calculate on the below page according to the number of users.

• https://www.altaro.com/office-365-backup/pricing.php

For MSPs, you can get the price from the below URL:https://www.altaro.com/msp/office-365-backup-pricing-msps.php

Configure Altaro Office 365 Backup MSPs

Here I am using the trial version of Altaro Office 365 Backup solution. Once you will sign up, you will receive the details for the Altaro Office 365  Backup Cloud management console access.

Here you can manage your Office 365 backups centrally from one place in the browser only.

Dashboard:

The dashboard looks like below when you will open the management console.

Add your Customer and Office 365 Organization

Now, we will see how we can add our first customer and Office 365 organization to the tool.

Here, first, you can add a customer, you can provide the name of the customer and then select the backup option.

The backup plan is very important here to select. You can select from the below two options:

• Mailbox Backup Plan: If you want to choose to take a backup of your mailbox only.
• Mailbox, OneDrive, and SharePoint Backup Plan: If you want to take a backup of everything like your mailbox, OneDrive, and SharePoint.

Click on Next.

Check the fig below:

Add an Office 365 Organization

Next, you can add an Office 365 Organization to it. Just provide a user-friendly name and then the Office 365 tenant name.

Then click on Next. Then you need to grant access to three applications. Once you click it will open a new tab, where you can select a user who will have tenant admin permission (recommended).

Once you will click on Accept, I will show you a screen like below, click on Close and you will navigate back to the previous screen.

The whole screen looks like the below:

Click on Next.

Take Back-Up of User’s Mailboxes or Files from OneDrive or SharePoint

The next screen is quite important, where you need to choose from the below options:

• Back-Up all Users
• Select Users to Back Up
• Select Users to Back Up later

You can also optionally select the checkbox “Automatically back up any new Users created in the future” if you want the newly created users to be added automatically.

If you will select the “Select Users to Back Up” options, then it will populate all the users from your Organization. Here also you can select if you want to take back up of only mailbox or OneDrive also.

Then it will ask you to select the SharePoint Files you want to take backup.

Either you can select to take backup of all the files from all SharePoint document libraries.

Or you can also select any SharePoint site from all your sites in your Office 365. Here I have created one SharePoint site.

Then you can see it will display the Configuration summary like below, Click on Finish.

Check Back-Up Status

From the Dashboard, you can check the backup status.

Here you can see the Mailbox, SharePoint backup status.

Restore Mailbox or OneDrive or SharePoint Files

It also allows you to restore mailbox, OneDrive or SharePoint files from Altaro Office 365 backup cloud management console.

Here you can click on Restore -> Mailbox and then choose the customer and the Office 365 organization like below:

Then you can select the Mailbox like below:

Then you can select mailbox version to restore like below:

Then you can select the Restore Destination from one of the below options:

• Restore all Emails, Calendar Items, and Contacts back to the same Mailbox (It will restore everything in a new folder in the target mailbox)
• Restore all Emails, Calendar Items, and Contacts to a different Mailbox (Can be restored to a different name with same Office 365 organization)
• Restore to PST File (available for download)
• Restore to Zip Archive (available for download)

Then you can select Restore Options.

Here it will display to the account to which the download link will be emailed and also it will display the passphrase which will be used to unzip the ZIP file. Make sure to copy the file PassPhrase.

Then it will show the message like below:

From the dashboard also, you can see the Restore History list from the Dashboard.

The user will also receive an email notification with the downloadable link like below:

In the same way we can also restore the SharePoint and OneDrive files.

• your organization needs more information to keep your account secure office 365

Conclusion

The tool is very much easy to use and a very good user-friendly tool for Office 365 backup of mailboxes, SharePoint, and OneDrive files.

You can also sign up and try this tool which will be a 30 days fully functional trial.

As a Managed Service Provider, you can use Altaro Office 365 Backup for MSPs to take back up and restore of all your customer’s Office 365 mailboxes or OneDrive and SharePoint files.

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