Backing up Microsoft 365 tenant data

Last published : Apr 02, 2026
You can configure a backup job for Microsoft 365 tenants. For primary backups, the Forever Incremental, Consolidate full, and Custom full templates only support deduplication disk storage. Duplicate backups can be targeted to any supported storage. When you create a forever incremental backup, a full backup is taken followed by incremental backups. A Consolidate Full backup is run by consolidating the previous set of full and incremental backups. Subsequent incremental backups use the consolidate full backup as a baseline to determine changes.
To back up Microsoft 365 servers
  1. On the Backup and Restore tab, select a Microsoft 365 tenant from the list of servers.
  2. Do one of the following:
    • In the Backupsgroup at the top of the screen, clickBackup > Create Microsoft 365 Backup.
    • On the Backup and Restore tab, in the Groupspane, right-click the server group that you want to back up and clickBackup > Create Microsoft 365 Backup.
  3. On the Backup Definition Propertiesdialog box, in theSelectionsbox, clickEdit to add or remove resources from the backup selection list.
  4. On the Backup Selections dialog box, select the check boxes for the type of data to be backed up and the users for whom you want to back up the data.
    User You can select individual users and then select the type of data you want to back up.
    - Mailbox
    - Archive Mailbox
    - OneDrive
    You can select all users, individual users, or use the search to filter for a specific user.
    Group You can select a group and then select the type of data you want to back up.
    - Group Mailbox
    - Group Files
    - User Mailbox
    - User Archive Mailbox
    - User OneDrive
    Depending on the type of data that you select, data for all the users in the selected group are backed up.
    You can select all groups, individual groups, or use the search to filter for a specific group.
    Public Folders You cannot select individual Public folders during backup. All the available Public folders are backed up. You can select individual items to restore as the list of public folders is available from the Restore Wizard.
    Ensure that the UPN has administrative access to the entire folder hierarchy, because backup runs only for the folders that have access to the hierarchy.
    The restore fails if the User Principal Name (UPN) provided during tenant configuration does not have administrative access to the public folders.
    Note: If you select a user and then select a group where the same user is part of the group, the user data is backed up only once. Note: If you exclude some mailboxes in theUserstab for a backup and if those users are part of a selected group in theGrouptab, then data of the excluded mailboxes is not backed up.
  5. Click Selection Summary to view your backup selection.
  6. Click OK.
  7. On the Backup Definition Propertiesdialog box, in theBackupbox, clickEdit.
  8. On the Backup Optionsdialog box, in the left pane, selectSchedule , and then select the schedule for this job.
By default, two templates are available, Forever Incremental and Consolidate Full. You can also add a custom full template.
For more information about Forever Incremental backups, refer to the following information.
See “ Forever Incremental Backup ”.
  1. On the Backup Optionsdialog box, in the left pane, selectMicrosoft 365 , and then select the required parallel streams or workload-specific settings for the backup.
See Configuring parallel streams and job settings for Microsoft 365.
  1. On the Backup Options dialog box, click any of the optional settings in the left pane that you want to set for this job.
  2. Click OK.
  3. (Optional) On the Backup Definition Properties dialog box, you can add stages to this backup definition to duplicate your Microsoft 365 data to any supported storage device.
  4. Click OK.
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