Overview: M365 Backup & Archive Performance & Limitations

Probax Microsoft 365 Backup & Archive provides our partners with a simplistic method of backing up customer Microsoft 365 data with excellent reporting for potential errors within the offsite backup.

Like all cloud based products, there are certain limitations that may be encountered that affect your backup experience.

Limitations of Veeam's backup for Microsoft 365

As Veeam's architecture continues to grow, so will it's capability to backup items from your M365 organizations. That being said, there are some considerations to make involving limitations around what is an isn't backed-up.

  1. For backup items and restorable items, Veeam has these listed in it's KB (see under 'Backups' and 'Restores'):
    https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbo365/guide/vbo_considerations.html?ver=60
    1. Given how new backups for Teams is, note well the limitations here:
  2. For any external site/domain builders (e.g GoDaddy), Veeam cannot backup organizations that are from a platform that does not support Microsoft Graph. Check your relevant platform to determine if it supports Microsoft Graph.

Microsoft 365 Backup & Archive Account

The Microsoft 365 Backup & Archive account used should always be a dedicated user designed specifically for Microsoft 365 Backup & Archive. Due to throttling limitations placed on a per-user basis, Microsoft 365 Backup & Archive will not perform optimally on a user account that is performing multiple other operations as well.

No license is required for the dedicated user.

Moving Microsoft 365 data to another Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 solution

Given the nature of the Probax cloud-to-cloud backups for Microsoft 365, Probax are unable to release any job-data, or cloud-stored backup files. We recommend restoring backed-up files directly using Hive when moving to another solution/on-site storage.

Performance for first backup

The first Microsoft 365 backup occurs at the start of the next backup window, which occur every 4 hours starting from midnight. The time to perform the initial backup will vary depending on number of Mailboxes, OneDrives and Sharepoint Sites that are chosen. Microsoft can have a very aggressive bandwidth throttling algorithm, which we have no control over. For large organisations the first backup may take as long as a week.

Performance for incremental backups

Probax performs, at most, 6 automatic daily backups. These backups depend on multiple factors, but may be reduced in the event of increased load on the backup server, or an increase in the backup job size for an organisation 

Speed of indexing

The rate at which the data indexes is dependent on the number of files and folders within the accounts you are attempting to access. Mailboxes will generally take 1 minute to index 100 items, whereas OneDrive backups and SharePoint sites will generally complete indexing within seconds.

Speed of restores

The restore rate of your data will vary depending on the amount of data being restored and the rate at which Veeam can upload that data to Microsoft. Performing a restore on only a select few files will take no longer than 60 seconds. This will be further improved as Veeam releases updates for their product.

We are constantly improving our backup solutions, should you have a feature you would like to request, please forward these to Probax Support.

For Technical support questions, please contact support@probax.io

For sales and product information, contact your Partner Manager.