Essentials for Office 365 2.15 - User Guide

Restoring Office 365 Groups Backup

The following are instructions for restoring Office 365 Groups from a specific backup:

1.Navigate to the backup, You can access the Restore wizard by either right-clicking on the selected username and selecting the "Restore" option

Or you can access the Restore Wizard by selecting "To Original Location" in the Restore section of the Ribbon.

2.This will start a restore membership content job.

Smart Backup

Smart Backup is an option available in the Backup Properties section of the Backup Wizard. This function is only available for Hyper Backups.

The smart backup functionality in Hyper Backup will help you to save space on storage. It uses the MD5 algorithm to scan backup files and excludes duplicates.  The MD5 message-digest algorithm is a widely used hash function producing a 128-bit hash value. Although MD5 was initially designed to be used as a cryptographic hash function, it can be used as a checksum to verify data integrity. If checksum for files is the same, Essentials tool will save only one file instead of storing two equal files.

Below is an example of a backup project completed with and without the smart backup functionality selected.

Classic SharePoint Online 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 SharePoint Online Classic Backup

In order to perform the SharePoint Online Backup as a Classic Backup you must first turn off Hyper Backup.

The following is an overview on how to create a Full Classic Backup.

1.Go to the Backup Tab in the Essentials menu.

2.From the Navigator pane select the Site Collection, site or sub-site that you would like to backup.  Selecting the site from the Navigator pane prior to running the backup is optional, but this process will auto-populate the URL into the configuration wizard.  Alternatively, you can skip to the next step and manually enter the SharePoint site URL into the appropriate field within the wizard.

3.In the Ribbon select the To Local Storage or the To Cloud Storage button. The Wizard will open to begin the configuration of your backup job.

§The To Local Storage option will save the backup project to a local or shared path within your network.  Local Read/Write permissions will be required for the location selected.

§The To Cloud Storage option will save the backup project to your cloud storage account in either Amazon S3 or Azure Containers.  Your account and key will be required.  For more information about the Cloud Storage options, please see Connecting to Cloud Storage.

4.In the backup wizard enter a name for your backup project and select which Service you wish to configure.  The following example will be using a SharePoint Online site collection for backup, however the configuration options for OneDrive for Business and Exchange Online can be found in the respective locations: Creating an Exchange Online Mailbox Backup, Creatingan Office 365 Group Backup, and Creating a OneDrive for Business Backup

5.SharePoint site backups can be configured with the following options:
 
Backup Options

Include Sub-sites - this option will include all sub-sites (including their user created lists and content) of the parent site as defined in the project's previous Site URL field.  

Exclude specific Sub-sites - this option will exclude all sub-sites that are specified in the loaded CSV file.  To create this CSV file, simply enter the name of the sub-site which you wish to exclude from the backup, click the Load button and then select this file.
 
Include Permissions - this option will include SharePoint site, list, and item level permissions from each uniquely permissioned object.
 
Include List Views - this option will include any custom create list views.  

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).
 
Apply Filter - this option will allow you to customize a filter to include/exclude content based on metadata.
 
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

Save to - this option will determine if the backup project is stored on your local storage (local or network path) or within your cloud storage provider (Amazon S3 or Azure)
 
Location - this field will display the full path to the location where the backups will be stored.  Click the Ellipsis button to the right to configure this location.

6.Press Finish to start the Backup.