An Overview of the Best Microsoft 365 Backup Solutions

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Widely used by large and mid-sized enterprises, Microsoft 365 is an excellent cloud solution to manage data, optimize operations, collaborate, and communicate effectively. Though it comes with great applications, there are risks of losing the data. Thus, businesses need an effective Office 365 backup and recovery solution to protect their crucial information.
Although Microsoft offers advanced security features for its applications, it doesn’t provide a comprehensive native backup for Microsoft 365. Now, this creates confusion among organizations and employees as they believe their data is safe and secure. In general, the pre-configured settings protect your data only for 30-90 days on average. That’s why you should have a backup solution in place to protect your data anytime. The Office 365 types and their users are different. Apart from Primary mailboxes, there is archive, shared, and public folder that resemble a mailbox, but their motives are different.

Key Points to Note before Choosing the Best Office 365 Backup Solution:

This blog compares the best Microsoft 365 cloud backup solutions available in the market to help you make your selection easier.

Performance, reliability, and easy deployment are the hallmarks of an essential cloud backup solution. A compatible and reliable cloud backup solution offers a speed of 4.5mbps for data backup and restoration. Kernel Office 365 Backup & Restore has received a rating of 4.9 out of 5 to become one of the most influential and helpful Microsoft 365 backup solutions for enterprises. Also, there are many other Office 365 tools that are worth mentioning.

Let’s have a thorough look at the best Microsoft 365 backup solutions that you can use to secure your business-critical information.

It is rated as one of the best Office 365 backup & restrore utilities in the market. It offers an advanced set of features to help you backup single/multiple Office 365 or on-premises/hosted Exchange Server to Outlook PST format. Below the software features describes in detail:

• Backup single/multiple Microsoft 365 mailboxes to Outlook PST file
• Offers smooth migration of Office 365 items to new PST files in the most secure manner
• Exports shared, archive mailboxes and public folders to PST file with metadata and permissions
• Uses administer account to automate the backup of Office 365 mailboxes
• Allows you to skip empty/deleted folders from the backup process
• Skips the duplicate items from your mailboxes while preserving the read/unread status of emails
• Designed with modern authentication algorithms to provide a secure login process and secure your account from any risks

It also provides a trial version that allows you to backup 10 items per folder.

Altaro is becoming a market-leading vendor of backup and recovery solutions for organizations. Their Microsoft 365 backup and restoration solution focuses on backing up Office 365 mailboxes and files stored within OneDrive and SharePoint. It is a cloud-based solution that makes it easy for individuals to deploy and configure.

• Easy to use and manage with a central cloud management console for configuration and data backup
• Creates automatic copies of emails, attachments, contacts, and calendars, including the files stored on your OneDrive and SharePoint
• View the current operational activities, restoration history, and organization’s health status
• Send your recovered mailboxes to the original mailbox, a different mailbox, or a secure zip file at the user’s location
• Get guidance throughout the backup process with a simple integrated wizard that makes it easy to carry out

Altaro offers continuous customer support to all its customers to help them resolve any issues faced while using the tool. However, the tool subscription is expensive for SMEs.

Veeam has been leading the cloud backup solution market for quite some time. It provides the Microsoft 365 backup solution as traditional on-premise software. It even allows you to store your data backups on their cloud storage or on-premises.

• Offers an intuitive UI and a wide range of sources for data backup
• Enables great control over the backup process to help you select specific data for the backup
• Minimize the complexity to maintain and manage server and storage infrastructure
• Offers up to 25 recovery options to cover all incidents, including complete recovery to more granular file-level recovery
• Provides various retention options for the users, including traditional item-level storage, snapshot-based incremental storage

It is ideal for large enterprises, as it is more comprehensive and costly. However, a new solution has also been launched for small enterprises to back up their data.

Acronis provides comprehensive disaster recovery and secure data backup solutions to help businesses secure their Office 365 data. It is growing as one of the speediest recovery solutions in the market due to Acronis’s VM technology that provides instantaneous recovery with minimum disruption.

• A normal yet effective backup solution that provides an automated process to help you secure your data
• Prevents unauthorized file modification and encryption for proactive ransomware protection powered by AI technology
• Authenticates the legitimacy of backup copies before restoration for complete security and protection
• Provides a web-based console to access information regardless of the location
• Easy to position and achieve across both Windows and Linux Servers that makes it ideal for every user
• The product can be installed and used in more than 25 languages, making it ideal for all SMEs and global enterprises

Acronis is quite an impressive cloud backup utility that offers a simple process to back up your Office 365 data. But, the tool is not much useful for every enterprise as the features are limited.

Commvault has been a market leader in data and information management and provides intelligent and scalable solutions. The effectiveness and reliability of the Commvault tools have made it a leader for eight years in the Gartner Magic Quadrant report. The tool is integrated with comprehensive features that can help you in various situations.

• An enterprise data backup solution that can protect data of both cloud and on-premise environments with a single web-based interface
• Allows you to automate the file retention processes with a proactive discovery of newly added datasets
• Removes the need of creating lengthy scripts as the processes are policy-driven with monitoring and reporting features
• Removes the duplicate and repetitive data copies to improve storage efficiency and the amount of data to be transferred
• Easy to install and organize on any system with minimum specifications and software requirements

The tool is ideal for large enterprises that need to backup and restore a large amount of data in their company. For SMEs, it is not much helpful as the costs are a little higher.

Backupify is a new name in the cloud backup solution market. Its tool is specially designed for small and mid-sized businesses. It started with a consumer model and expanded into an enterprise model with continuous updates and functionality additions. Backupify offers a lot of features for data backup at a lower price.

• A unique backup platform that provides a simple and interactive user interface for beginners as well as technical users
• Covers backup for all Microsoft 365 platforms, including Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams data
• Automates the backup process that runs three times a day to back up a large amount of data
• Detect new user mailboxes automatically, along with the automatic archiving of data from departing employees
• Allows you to backup specific data as per your requirements with advanced filters

Backupify is a great alternative to many costly and highly influential cloud backup tools that are not affordable for SMEs.

Rubrik Polaris is an excellent backup tool that makes your critical Microsoft 365 data secure, easily accessible, and discoverable. It offers the simplest way to backup and secure your Microsoft 365 data with smart algorithms. Rubrik can help you backup all your Office 365 data, including OneDrive, Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams.

• A simple and effective utility designed to help you secure and protect your Office 365 data at any cost
• Safeguards from data loss and facilitates streamlined management for your Microsoft 365 applications
• Allows you to recover accidentally deleted data items with point-in-time recovery, granular restores, and near-zero RTOs
• Unify the management process of Microsoft 365, Datacenters, and Cloud Apps with a single utility
• Search and restore specific emails, tasks, journals, and attachments with instant search functionality

Rubrik Polaris gives access to full centralized management and reporting tools to all admins from a single platform. It is fully compatible with Office 365 and Azure platforms with smooth connectivity via OAuth.
The above tools are compared based on various reviews, forums, and cloud backup capabilities to help you choose the best Microsoft 365 backup solution.

Wrap Up

Enterprises can lose their critical data in Microsoft 365 due to various reasons, such as external threats, accidental data deletion, and much more. So, you need to protect your data to avoid any reputational and financial risks with continuous backup and restoration. This blog highlights the best Microsoft 365 backup and restore solutions available in the market to secure and preserve your organization’s critical information.