Key among many of the benefits of Exchange Online as part of Office 365 is the backup & disaster recovery functionality that is part of the service.
Most people are appeased when reading the Office 365 Service Descriptions to know that Microsoft will look after their data for them.
There will always be the odd few people who are happy to go all in to the cloud but still want to maintain their own mailbox backups. Call them old fashioned, paranoid, or just extremely cautious – there aren’t any easy ways to perform backups against Exchange Online unless you build your own application calling Exchange Web Services and drawing down the data that way.
The mumblings of one of these old fashioned / paranoid / cautious people got me thinking, which got me Binging and to my amazement I found a pretty solution packaged up in some freeware!
The product is called MailStore Home and is simple and easy to use, and is free for non-commercial use. There is also a paid server version for those who want to use it in their corporate environments.
While I put my faith in Microsoft to look after the integrity of my mailbox data – for those that don’t (and really are you “all in” if you don’t want to?) there’s your solution.
Enjoy!
Discover more from Loryan Strant, Microsoft 365 MVP
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Thanks for the article.
The reason I found your article, is because I am looking for a backup solution for Exchange Online. Microsoft absolutely DOES NOT back up your mailboxes in the traditional sense. I had a user whose mailbox became corrupted on Exchange Online. We found out the hard way that Microsoft doesn’t do anything more than data redundancy. Well, the corruption was replicated.
The only fix was to delete the user account, and create a new user account, and then import, from a PST export of the corrupted mailbox, the mailbox data. This isn’t acceptable. Their techs were basically saying “this service is sold mainly for small shops who can’t afford an IT person and their own Exchange servers.” That’s fine, but Microsoft should be actually backing up the data, not just relying on redundancy.
Don I’m going to have to disagree with you. It’s not Microsoft’s job to be responsible for your data – they provide the “service”.
Think about the reality – Microsoft doing brick-level backups for every single mailbox it hosts? How long would it need to hold the data for? Sure it’s technically possible, but is it practical?
Microsoft explicitly states, on this page: http://community.office365.com/en-us/b/office_365_community_blog/archive/2011/09/28/how-does-exchange-online-back-up-my-data.aspx
“Making sure Exchange data is always available, even if there is a failure or it is accidently deleted, can be difficult and time consuming. With Exchange Online we take the pain out of backup management so your mailbox data is available when you need it, no matter what happens.”
You can disagree all you want, but they do not actually back up your data, while telling you not to worry about backing up your data.
I do agree with your assertion that they don’t back up your data and also don’t tell you to back it up.
The reality is that if IT always worked as expected we’d never need backups, but then we would due to human error.
My suggestion would be – if you want to be sure, back up your mailbox. It’s not Microsoft’s responsibility to provide backups beyond the short window they provide.
I agree with Don but I do understand the issues relating to Microsoft doing “proper” backups for every mailbox. Microsoft are providing more than just the service, they are also providing the product – Exchange2013. If there is data corruption, it is caused by the Exchange server and not the cloud “service”. That said, I have to compare Exchange Online to the competition. They have at least five 3rd party providers offering full backup services at very low rates which integrate seamlessly – Microsoft have none at this stage.
I remember how quickly I implemented a full backup strategy after that first failure all those years ago. Can you remember the stress of knowing you data is not 100% safe?
A fair point Darren, however sometimes the corruption can be caused by other things such a malformed packet in transit between Outlook (or a mobile device) and the Exchange Server – but that scenario is a minor one.
To your point ever since being in the cloud with Office 365 (and its predecessor BPOS) I have not backed my mailbox.
The stress of my data being 100% vs. the knowledge that I never have to do anything to support it or upgrade it = depends on what’s important to each person.
The part of most email that is worth saving is plain text. Attachments can be saved separately.
Awhile ago I wrote a VBscript to export my Outlook mail to text files and plain folders using Outlook object model methods obj.SaveAsFile for attachments and .SaveAsTxt for text email.
This was for an older version of Outlook (2007?) but should be re-doable today, by anyone with time and scripting ability.
Primitive, but you won’t have to worry about importing it into Outlook 2025 a decade from now.
I have seen this blog it is very informative.
office 365 email backup