Overview

Requirements

Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, Microsoft Home & Student subscriptions are not supported for backup/restore purposes.

It is necessary to have full administrative access to the target Tenant to protect in order to provide the required permissions to the Azure Application linked to this Bacula Enterprise Microsoft 365 Plugin.

Currently the plugin must be installed on a Linux based OS (RH, Debian, Ubuntu, SLES ..) where a Bacula Enterprise File Daemon is installed.

The OS where the File Daemon is installed must have installed Java version 8 or above.

If the Sharepoint module is going to be used, the OS where File Daemon is installed must also have the following packages installed:

  • PowerShell v7.2.1 or above

  • PnP Powershell v1.9.0 or above

Memory and computation requirements completely depend on the usage of this plugin (parallelization, environment size, etc). However, it is expected to have a minimum of 4GB RAM in the server where the File Daemon is running. By default, every job could end up using up to 512Mb of RAM in demanding scenarios (usually it will be less). However, there can be particular situations where this could be higher. This memory limit can be adjusted internally (see Out of Memory). Refer to the Scope section below for any service specific requirements.

Why Protect Microsoft 365?

This is a common question that arises frequently among IT and Backup professionals, so it is important to have a clear picture of it. It is true that Microsoft offers some services intended to prevent data loss:

  • As with any cloud data, Microsoft 365 data is geo-replicated using Azure cloud to several destinations automatically and transparently. Therefore, complete data loss because of hardware failures are very unlikely to happen.

  • Data Loss Protection service: Policy based services capable of detecting filtered content and act upon it encrypting it or modifying it in order to protect it (remove headers, etc). This is not a backup tool, is a service to prevent undesired actions to the content stored in Microsoft 365 (for example sharing confidential information with the wrong people).

  • Retention policies of Microsoft 365: Microsoft retains a maximum of 30 days of deleted information from active subscriptions. Therefore it is possible to recover accidental deleted items inside that period. For more information:

There are no other protection mechanisms for data protection. Below is a listing of challenges not covered:

  • No Ransomware protection: If data suffers an attack and becomes encrypted, data is lost.

  • No malicious attacker protection: If data is deleted permanently, data is lost.

  • No real point-in-time recovery for Exchange 365, and recoveries of partially deleted files are limited to 30 days.

  • Point in time recovery for OneDrive/Sharepoint limited to 30 days from deletion.

  • It is not possible to align data protection of Microsoft 365 services to general retention periods or policies longer than 30 days.

  • No automated way to extract any data from the cloud to save it in external places (this could lead to eventual compliance problems)

Go back to Microsoft 365 (M365) Plugin article.