Backup of the business data in Office 365 could be a critical business requirement.
Giving users the possibility to generate backups by themself can be a great added value.
Backup of Office 365 is important for many organizations. Having the possibility to backup and restore SharePoint, Exchange, OneDrive and Teams could be a very useful feature for business users.
Improve the offered services to business users and secure your data in the Office 365.
Learn how to set up a self-service backup for Office 365.
Why Office 365 self service backup could be useful?
Securing the data hosted in Office 365 from ransomware encryption or a human mistake could be a critical requirement for your organization.
The standardized and automated backup process connected with reliable SLA addresses this need fully. That’s why it is important to choose a reliable and scalable backup platform for large Office 365 tenants.
Personally, I believe that in the security of the organization, people could be the most important factor. That’s why I love the idea of giving business users the possibility to generate and restore an additional backup of the data in Office 365.
Moreover that kind of service could allow limit number of service request to Helpdesk in the area of restoring lost data.
Of course, there are retention features that allow restoring data in some scenarios, but having a fully functional backup that allows restoring user data from a specific point it time is great added value.
In this article, I want to show the use case of the implementation of Office 365 self-service backup using AFI.AI.
AFI.AI your cloud backup vendor
I recommend considering AFI.AI as the cloud-ready reliable backup platform for Microsoft 365. AFI offers fully cloud-based backup for Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and Kubernetes.
In a few minutes, you configure the backup process for the data in Office 365 using AFI.AI. You will have the possibility to create backups for Exchange mailboxes, data stored in SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams and user data and groups.
AFI.AI is not free, but you can set up this solution on your Microsoft 365 tenant for free for 4-weeks without sharing a credit card.
I prepared guidelines on how to configure a free AFI.AI trial for your Microsoft 365.
Setup of the AFI.AI on your Office 365 will allow you to configure self-service backup for Office 365 business users.
Configure Office 365 self-service backup platform
To set up the self-service backup solution for Office 365 business users you will need to setup this functionality first.
1. In the first step open the AFI backup from Office 65 app launcher using admin account.
2. After authentication open the Settings in the Service section.
and open the Self Service.
3. In the new windows you will be able to configure available features for the business users in the self service backup platform.
Available options:
- Browse backup data – any domain user is able to browse own backup data including Mail, Drive, Contacts, Calendars and Chats backup content, but can’t export the data or preview email content without additional permissions.
- Preview email content – any domain user can see email content in their own backups.
- In-place recovery – any domain user is able to recover their own data to its original location (recovery operation will reconstruct the original folder structure). This recovery mode should be used with caution as it will overwrite files if they have been changed since the point in time when the backup was done.
- Data export – any domain user is able to download data from their own backup.
Set up the preferable configuration and Save it.
Now self-service backup will be available for all Office 365 users.
How self-service backup works Office 365 users
Users could navigate to the self-service backup platform from the AFI.AI app in the Office 365 app launcher or directly through the https://app.afi.ai/ portal.
After authentication user will be navigated to simplify AFI.AI panel which allows you to execute multiple operations:
- You can select which data components you want to restore or preview (1)
- You can select a date from when the data should be accessed (2). This feature will allow you to execute and restore the data from a very specific point in time.
- You can download the data to your computer or restore it to Office 365 directly (3).
- It is also possible to preview the data directly in the app (4). This feature can save you tons of time when you are searching for the very specific instance of the data.
What is very important in this feature, is the performance of accessing the data available in the backup. In large environments with a huge amount of data searching through TB of emails could be very time-consuming.
AFI.AI solution provides very quick access to preview and restores options of your emails, files and more.
What’s next?
Bravo! You learned how to configure self-service backup in Office 365. Learn more about backup and data retention: Export Office 365 mailboxes to PST, How to prepare yourself to choose backup platform or how to backup Teams.
Do you want more?
I prepared more articles around main Office 365 apps, like Exchange Online, Microsoft Outlook, Power Automate and SharePoint Online.
Conclusion
Learn how to setup self service backup of the Office 365 available for your business users. Setup Microsoft 365 self-service backup using AFI.AI.
