IT Consulting · Capability area
Microsoft 365 backup and recovery
Your Microsoft 365 environment contains some of your company's most important information: email, documents, SharePoint sites, OneDrive files, Teams content, calendars, and business records.
Microsoft provides strong availability, retention, versioning, and recovery capabilities. Microsoft also offers Microsoft 365 Backup for Exchange Online, SharePoint, and OneDrive. But none of that eliminates the need to decide what must be recoverable, how far back recovery needs to go, and how quickly the business needs its data back.
Sunrise helps organizations design that recovery strategy, select and configure the appropriate backup platform, document recovery procedures, and test that those procedures actually work.
The result is not simply “we have backups.” It is knowing what is protected, how it can be recovered, and what to do when something goes wrong.
Microsoft 365 backup
Microsoft 365 data can be lost for plenty of reasons that have nothing to do with Microsoft having an outage.
A user can delete something important. An administrator can remove an account. Ransomware can modify files. A compromised account can cause widespread damage. Someone can discover months later that information they assumed was recoverable is no longer there.
A backup strategy gives the organization additional recovery options when those situations occur.
Depending on the environment, protection may include:
- Exchange Online mailboxes
- SharePoint Online
- OneDrive
- Microsoft Teams data
- Microsoft 365 Groups
- Entra ID objects and configuration
- Other business-critical Microsoft 365 data
Exactly what is protected depends on the backup platform.
Sunrise helps determine what needs protection, configures the backup environment, defines retention and recovery requirements, and documents the recovery process.
Retention is not backup
Microsoft 365 already includes useful recovery features such as recycle bins, version history, retention policies, and deleted-item recovery.
Those capabilities are important, and sometimes they are all that is needed.
But they serve a different purpose from a dedicated backup system.
Retention helps preserve information according to policies inside Microsoft 365. Backup creates additional recovery points specifically so data can be restored after accidental deletion, malicious activity, ransomware, administrative mistakes, or other data-loss events.
Microsoft itself now offers Microsoft 365 Backup in addition to its standard retention and recovery capabilities.
The important question is therefore not:
“Does Microsoft keep copies of our data?”
The better question is:
“If something important disappears or is damaged, can we recover it within the timeframe the business needs?”
That is what the recovery strategy needs to answer.
Microsoft 365 recovery options
Microsoft 365 has several layers of recovery.
For everyday problems, native recovery features may be enough. A user might restore a deleted file, recover an older document version, or recover recently deleted email without ever touching a backup platform.
For more serious situations, the requirements change.
Examples include:
- A large number of files being encrypted or overwritten
- A SharePoint site being damaged or deleted
- A mailbox needing to be recovered after an employee account was removed
- Data loss discovered long after the original event
- A compromised administrator deleting or modifying information
- Multiple users or workloads needing to be restored at once
Microsoft 365 Backup provides dedicated point-in-time protection for Exchange Online, SharePoint, and OneDrive, while third-party platforms may provide additional workload coverage, retention options, administrative separation, or recovery capabilities.
There is no single correct recovery architecture for every organization.
The right one depends on what data matters, how much data could reasonably be lost, and how quickly it needs to return. Regulatory requirements, cost, and the risks the organization is protecting against all shape it too.
Choosing a backup platform
A backup product should be chosen based on recovery requirements, not simply because it appears on a recommended-products list.
We evaluate questions such as:
- What does it protect? Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, Entra ID, and other workloads do not have identical coverage across products.
- How frequently is data protected? This affects how much recent work could be lost.
- How long is backup data retained?
- Where is the backup data stored?
- Who can access or delete the backups?
- Can backups be protected from ransomware or a compromised administrator?
- How granular are restores? Can we recover one message or file without restoring an entire mailbox or site?
- How quickly can realistic amounts of data be restored?
- What happens when an employee leaves?
- Can the data be exported if the organization later changes backup providers?
- What does the platform actually cost at the organization's scale?
Sunrise works with Microsoft 365 backup technologies and third-party backup platforms based on the requirements of the environment.
Datto SaaS Protection
Datto SaaS Protection provides Microsoft 365 backup for workloads including Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams. Datto currently publishes automated backups three times per day along with granular and point-in-time recovery capabilities.
It may make sense where an organization already uses Datto or Kaseya products, works with an MSP using the Datto platform, or where its recovery capabilities fit the required design.
Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup
Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup protects Microsoft 365 workloads including Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Groups, Planner, and OneNote. Barracuda also provides Entra ID backup capabilities.
OneNote notebooks back up, but they no longer restore to Microsoft 365 — Barracuda withdrew that in March 2025, after Microsoft retired app-only authentication for the OneNote Graph APIs. Recovery is by export.
Its included Entra ID backup currently covers users, groups, roles, and administrative units, with broader identity protection available through Barracuda's premium Entra ID offering.
Microsoft 365 Backup
Microsoft also provides its own Microsoft 365 Backup service for Exchange Online, SharePoint, and OneDrive.
It provides one-year backup retention, frequent recovery points, and high-speed recovery capabilities designed for scenarios such as ransomware, accidental deletion, and malicious deletion. The service operates within Microsoft's data boundary and uses a consumption-based pricing model.
Which approach makes sense depends on the environment.
We evaluate the options against the organization's actual recovery requirements rather than forcing every client onto the same product.
Published by the vendors: Datto SaaS Protection · Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup · Barracuda documentation — what is backed up · Microsoft 365 Backup
Naming these products describes what Sunrise deploys. It is not an endorsement, a partnership, an accreditation or a claim of any status with any vendor, and every statement above is taken from the vendor's own published material. Where Sunrise holds a commercial interest in a product it recommends, the recommendation says so.
Recovery runbooks
Having backups is only the first half of recovery. Someone still needs to know what to do when the business says:
“We need these files back.”
A recovery runbook provides that process. It can define:
- What happened
- Who is responsible for recovery
- Which systems or data should be restored first
- Which backup or recovery point should be used
- How the restore should be performed
- What dependencies need to be considered
- How users are affected during recovery
- How the restored data is validated
- Who confirms that recovery is complete
We also help organizations establish two important recovery requirements:
- How much recent data can we afford to lose? This becomes the Recovery Point Objective, or RPO.
- How long can this system or data be unavailable? This becomes the Recovery Time Objective, or RTO.
Those are business decisions first and technical requirements second. Once they are understood, the backup and recovery environment can be designed around them.
Restore testing
A backup is much more useful when someone has actually tested the recovery process.
Restore testing verifies that:
- Backup data can be accessed
- The documented procedure works
- Permissions are correct
- The expected data comes back
- Dependencies have not been overlooked
- The restore can be completed in a reasonable timeframe
- The people responsible for recovery know what to do
Testing also exposes problems before an actual incident does.
A restore might technically work but take far longer than expected. A procedure may depend on an administrator account nobody has access to anymore. A SharePoint restore may succeed while an application depending on the site still does not work.
Those are exactly the problems a recovery test is supposed to find.
Sunrise can design the test, execute it with the client, document the results, update the recovery procedure, and hand over a tested runbook for future use.
Where this leads
The worst time to discover your recovery options is after data has already been lost.
We help organizations answer the important questions in advance:
What are we protecting?
How far back can we recover?
How quickly can we get it back?
Who knows how to restore it?
Have we actually tested it?
For organizations preparing for a migration, tenant consolidation, acquisition, or broader Microsoft 365 assessment, backup and recovery should be reviewed as part of the target environment rather than treated as an afterthought.