Essentials for Office 365 2.15 - User Guide

Hyper Office 365 Groups Backup

Essentials for Office 365 Backup is a simple and easy to use backup tool that empowers administrators and power users to efficiently backup, archive, and restore their content from SharePoint, Office 365 SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business sites, and Exchange Online mailboxes (when licensed).  With Backup, you can quickly retrieve individual items or entire sites.

·Site Backup: Backup and extract site collections, sites, lists and libraries, documents and versions, permissions, views, column groups, fields, terms, and content types in SharePoint or Office 365.

·OneDrive for Business Backup:  Backup and extract content, versions and SharePoint permissions from one or more users' OneDrive for Business Documents library within your Office 365 tenant.

·Exchange Online Mailbox Backup:  Backup and extract messages, folders, calendar events, tasks and more from one or more users' Exchange Online Mailboxes within your Office 365 tenant. This feature is automatically disabled and must be manually enabled.

·Cloud Storage: Backup and Restore to/from Azure and Amazon S3

·Extract: Extract legacy or orphaned content from SharePoint and Office 365 to a file system based on specific search and filter criteria of your choice.

·Restore: Restore content to existing SharePoint or Office 365 site collections, sites, list and libraries, and folders without rolling back the entire SharePoint farm. (Cannot be used for Migration.  Choose Essentials for Office 365 migration for the best results)

·Ensure High Availability: Access critical content and ensure continuous 24x7 business operations in Office 365 and other hosted environments in the event of a service interruption through local backups.

·Rapid Item Level Restore: Granularly restore selected SharePoint items from the local backup copy with the option to include metadata, versions, and authorship properties.

·Schedule Backups: Use Windows scheduler to run full or incremental backups from PowerShell or the command line as a part of larger batch jobs.

Creating an Office 365 Groups Backup

Essentials Backup supports the ability to create a backup of any single, or all, Office 365 Group sites:

1.Press the "To Local Storage" or the "To Cloud Storage" button located in the ribbon. This will generate the Backup Properties screen.

2.Enter a project name for your Backup, this name will be displayed in the Backup Navigator.

3.Under the Connection section of the wizard, select "Office 365 Groups" as your Service type.

4.Enter your Global Administrator username and click the Connect button.

5.When prompted, enter your Global Administrator password and click Connect.

6.You can choose to "Include all Office 365 Groups", which will create a backup of all of your Office 365 Groups, or you can select to specify which Office 365 Groups you wish to backup by either loading a list from a CSV file (by clicking Load from CSV), or selecting from a list provided by clicking Select from Office 365.

7.Choose your desired Backup, Retention, and Location options (Note: a location must be specified in order to continue) and click Finish to begin. For information on how to connect to Cloud storage, see the Connecting to Cloud Storage section.
 
Backup Options

Include Versions - this option will allow you to specify how many versions of each item to include with the backup.  If left unchecked, no versions will be included, if "Include All Versions" is selected then all versions will be included. If "Include Most recent versions" is selected then only the number of versions specified will be included, starting with the most recent and working backwards (major and minor versions are included).
 
Include Group Mailbox (This option is only available for Classic Backups)- include the group mailbox in the Office 365 group backup.
 
Include only those items - This "Include Only" filter allows the configuration of which items, based on creation date, should be included with this backup.
The filter provides the following four scenarios. Please note that using this filter will also dictate which items are included in updates (Full, Differential and Incremental).
Include only those items "more recent" than a specified date. When this is configured, the backup will only include items created from today back until the specified date. It will never include items that were created prior to this date since the starting point (the specified "Date") has been explicity defined.
Include only those items "more recent" than a range. When this is configured, the backup will only include items created from today going back to the number of days, weeks, months or years configured. Both the today date and the starting point are dynamic and will vary based on the operation's start and end times.
Include only those items "older" than a specified date.  When this is configured, the backup will only include items created prior to the specified date. In this configuration, since both the start and end dates are explicitly defined updates are unnecessary as the included items will never change. This option should only be used for a one-time backup operation.
Include only those items "older" than a range. When this is configured, the backup will only include items created prior to the specified date going back to the number of days, weeks, months or years configured. Both the starting date and the ending point are dynamic and will vary based on the operation's start and end times.
 
Send Notification -this option can be changed when updating a backup.
 
Smart Backup - This functionality in Hyper Backup will help you to save space on storage. It uses the MD5 algorithm to scan backup files and excludes duplicates.
 
Retention Policy

Keep Full Backups - if configured, this will specify how long the software will retain any Full backups that were created in this project.  The retention purge will occur at the start of the next run or scheduled backup update for each project which contains a configured retention policy.
 
Keep Incremental Backups - if configured, this will specify how long the software will retain any Incremental or Differential backups that were created in this project.  The retention purge will occur at the start of the next run or scheduled backup update for each project which contains a configured retention policy.
 
Save Backup to Location

Keep Full Backups - if configured, this will specify how long the software will retain any Full backups that were created in this project.  The retention purge will occur at the start of the next run or scheduled backup update for each project which contains a configured retention policy.
 
Keep Incremental Backups - if configured, this will specify how long the software will retain any Incremental or Differential backups that were created in this project.  The retention purge will occur at the start of the next run or scheduled backup update for each project which contains a configured retention policy.

Include Only Backup Filter

When configuring the initial backup job, you may choose to apply an Inclusion filter against the content within the selected mailbox folders.  This filter is based on the modification date of each item within the group and is designed to Include the content within the specified time period (by Date or by Range), not Exclude.

Please review the following scenarios to determine which setting is best for your backup needs.  Please note that the initial filter configuration will impact how Updates (Full, Incremental, and Differential) are performed, so choose wisely.

Each configuration includes a chart displaying what will be included (green bar) versus what will be excluded (red bar).  The bar on the bottom represents the initial Full backup and each above it represents the updates that can be performed.

Include only those items More Recent than Date: MM/DD/YYYY

When this filter is chosen, the backup will only include items that were modified after the date specified and never items from before the date.