Are You Backing Up Your Entire Exchange Mailbox in Office 365?

You’ve been hearing from us for a while that it’s important to protect the data you work with in SaaS applications such as Microsoft Office 365. Even though SaaS application providers do an excellent job of protecting your data from infrastructure or application failures, they can’t (and won’t) protect you from the mistakes your admins and users may make, nor will they protect you from malicious activity.

In the case of Exchange Online, you probably know how important it is to have a 3rd party backup application like Spanning Backup for Office 365 protecting your critical production emails, so that if there is any data loss you are able to recover quickly. But are you sure that your backup application is protecting all of the email associated with a user account in Office 365? Specifically, are you backing up your Archive Mailboxes?

In Office 365, the Archive Mailbox is also referred to as the “In-Place Archive.” It allows users to move messages they may want to keep longer than an organization’s retention rules allow. If you’re a long-time Outlook user, the Archive Mailbox is the new version of the .pst file.

The Archive Mailbox shows up below the Inbox (and all the Inbox folders). It has its own Deleted Items folder and Recoverable Items folder as well. Mail flows through these Archive Mailbox folders  in the same way in which it flows through the Inbox folders. This means that email can be accidentally (or maliciously) deleted permanently from these folders in the exact same way that they can for the Inbox. That’s why you need to ensure that the backup application you choose is protecting this mailbox as well!

Users can move items to the Archive Mailbox to lengthen the retention policies set by administrators on the entire tenant. Admins can also set retention policies to move items from the Inbox to the Archive Mailbox to keep the Inbox lean and working optimally. Because of this,  it is likely that this mailbox will hold much more data over the course of an account’s lifecycle.  To effectively protect all of your users’ data, your backup application should be able to help you quickly recover all Inbox and Archive Mailbox data should the worst happen.

Spanning Backup for Office 365 backs up all of the user’s mail data, provides a way for them to quickly recover the data themselves, or alternatively, provides a way for an Administrator to restore the data to a different user. This now includes the Archive Mailbox folder. If you are a current Spanning customer, there’s nothing for you to activate – that folder is automatically being backed up.

If you would like to see how easy it is to protect all of your Exchange Online data, start a 14-day free trial of Spanning Backup for Office 365 today.