Office365

Synology now with backup for Office 365

by

Long time no hear, and I’m really sorry for that. It was a busy time, with a new job, huge project and also military duty in between. But now things are calming down, and so do I. And I’ve got some time for a new blog post.

Recently i stumbled across a newsletter from Synology. They now have a backup tool for Office 365 available which is free of costs for 10 users. Extra license packs can be purchased for adding and renewing additional licenses. That doesn’t sound so bad. But wait. Office 365 is in the cloud, doesn’t Microsoft back it up so that I don’t have to worry about? Well, long story short, NO. There is some retention like deleted items and stuff, and you can modify specific settings. But backing up Office 365 data is all in your own responsibility. There are various backup solutions like Veeam Backup for Office 365 which work absolutely great, and also the recently announced solution from Synology which I’m writing about today. Let’s look at it a little closer.

Unfortunately not every Synolgy NAS system is supported, so please have a look at the list here if your devices is on it or not. Lucky me, i bought a new NAS for my vSphere homelab some months ago which fits perfectly for this test setup.

Supported NAS systems

  • 18 series:FS1018, RS3618xs, RS818RP+, RS818+, RS2818RP+, RS2418RP+, RS2418+, DS3018xs, DS418play, DS918+, DS718+, DS218+, DS1618+
  • 17 series:FS3017, FS2017, RS3617xs, RS3617RPxs, RS4017xs+, RS3617xs+, RS18017xs+, DS3617xs, DS1817+, DS1517+
  • 16 series:RS2416RP+, RS2416+, RS18016xs+, DS416play, DS916+, DS716+II, DS716+, DS216+II, DS216+
  • 15 series:RS815RP+, RS815+, RC18015xs+, DS3615xs, DS415+, DS2415+, DS1815+, DS1515+
  • 14 series:RS3614xs, RS3614RPxs, RS814RP+, RS814+, RS3614xs+, RS2414RP+, RS2414+
  • 13 series:RS3413xs+, RS10613xs+, DS713+, DS2413+, DS1813+, DS1513+
  • 12 series:RS3412xs, RS3412RPxs, RS812RP+, RS812+, RS2212RP+, RS2212+, DS3612xs, DS712+, DS412+, DS1812+, DS1512+
  • 11 series:RS3411xs, RS3411RPxs, RS2211RP+, RS2211+, DS3611xs, DS411+II, DS411+, DS2411+, DS1511+

More information about Active Backup for Office 365

Synology has plenty of information about Active Backup for Office 365 on their website.

Some of the features:

  • Protection of mail, calendar, contacts, OneDrive
  • With Active Backup for Office 365 Portal enabled, both employees and admins can easily locate items for restoration and restore/export them with simple clicks
  • Mail/calendar attachments (if stored in Btrfs volumes) and OneDrive files that contain identical content will only be stored to Synology NAS once, which saves storage space
  • Files stored in Btrfs volumes on Synology NAS can be deduplicated with previous versions, minimizing the storage space required

But now let’s talk tech and let’s dive into the setup and configuration of Active Backup for Office 365.

Read more

Veeam – Backup your Office 365 mailboxes (on a UNC path)

by
Veeam Backup for Office 365

Today i’d like to provide you another one of my straight-forward walk through guides. Everybody is talking about cloud. Is it either a private cloud or a public cloud, or probably something between (a hybrid cloud, you don’t say…). So many people and companies want to have their stuff migrated to the cloud or are already using cloud technologies.

Microsoft Office 365 is also one of these cloud technologies. It’s your mail hosted in the cloud. It is available in different sizes and versions, combined with powerful office and collaboration applications (Word, Excel, Outlook, Skype for Business and Sharepoint Online and so on) or just the mail part of it. You can choose whatever you need, and at very attractive pricing conditions.

Compare the Microsoft Office 365 business plans here:

https://products.office.com/en-us/business/compare-more-office-365-for-business-plans

Microsoft Office 365 Business Plans

But today we don’t talk about how cool and great this Office 365 stuff is. We wanna talk about how you backup your mails. Your mails are stored somewhere in the cloud (actually a physical datacenter located somewhere). I don’t know if Microsoft does backups for YOUR mails. It’s always better to do that by yourself. Then you know it’s working and you can recover in case of a user deleted something, or whatever can happen with these mails.

So let’s talk about Veeam Backup for Office 365.

This nice piece of software from Veeam is now available since a few days. It’s working very fine, and it is simple to install as you know that from other Veeam software. As mentioned above, this post should guide you through the simple setup and configuration of Veeam Backup for Office 365. When i don’t count the time it took to take screenshots, then the installation is done in a few minutes. Promise. Let’s dig into that.

Read more