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I admin about 50 users on the Sherweb.com cloud Exchange platform. After an experience today, where a mailbox was deleted accidentally, I discovered that Sherweb's recovery/backup practices only guarantee recovery of data older than 7 days. This means any emails/contacts/calendars/etc created more recently than 7 days ago would likely not be recovered at all. Since recent items are the most critical to these users, this type of backup/recovery is unacceptable, so I'm searching for an alternate way to back up these mailboxes. (Thankfully we were able to restore the user's mailbox by exporting everything from Outlook, as they had their Cached Exchange Mode set to "ALL", so the entire mailbox data existed on the user's local machine/OST file. I exported and re-imported to a new profile and they're back in business.)

Since I don't have access to the Exchange servers (they belong to Sherweb), is there a recommended way to automatically back up users' Exchange mailboxes on their local computers, or even to a third-party server/service?

I found the SafePST app, but I'm skeptical of a free app with poorly written English being used in an enterprise environment.

It seems the OST file is locked and can't be backed up until Outlook is closed on the local machine. Also, it seems the entire OST must be exported to a PST at once (no option for incremental backups?)

Is anyone aware of a way to either

1) Back up a cloud Exchange mailbox on the local user's PC automatically

-or-

2) Back up cloud Exchange mailboxes to a server or third party service

while performing the backup at least daily (preferably every 1-4 hours), and incrementally or at least with multiple available backups to restore from?

Incremental backups would be nice, as some of the users' mailboxes are multiple GBs in size. This would be prohibitively large for keeping multiple copies of each user's backup.

I would even entertain the possibility of setting up a separate server (local or cloud) just for backups, but that sort of defeats the purpose of the cloud-based Exchange mailboxes. Would prefer to run some sort of scheduled task or app on each client's PC to accomplish this.

Thanks for any tips or suggestions!

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    Most backup solutions are going to require Administrator level access to the mailboxes, whether in a hosted Exchange scenario or in Office 365. As for SafePST why not buy a single license and test it out? Out of curiosity, what are you paying per user/mailbox? Might you be better served moving to Office 365?
    – joeqwerty
    Mar 19, 2020 at 0:10
  • We're paying around $6 USD per user/mo. Does office365 provide more granular backup controls or better backup features? Mar 19, 2020 at 2:01
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    Office 365 doesn't provide any backups, but it would give you the ability to control your own backups using a third party service. What does the $6 per user/per month give you? Just Exchange hosting? Any other services?
    – joeqwerty
    Mar 19, 2020 at 4:05
  • Nothing except exchange. Mar 19, 2020 at 6:57
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    You can get Exchange Online Plan 1 (Exchange only 50 GB mailbox) for $4 per user/per month directly from Microsoft. That would allow you to control your own email and use your own backups. The average Office 365 backup is $3-4 per user/per month. You'd wind up paying $1-2 more per month/per user but you'd have control of your own backups and you'd be able to restore a deleted mailbox immediately directly in Office 365 without even needing a backup.
    – joeqwerty
    Mar 19, 2020 at 12:37

2 Answers 2

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It is exactly what joeqwerty has said, if you don’t have administrator permission, you are very hard to back up. So you can follow the suggestions which is provided by joeqwerty. Here’s an article for your reference. All you need to know about Office 365 and Exchange mailbox backup

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We are using EdbMails Exchange backup application and it costs us $5 per month for 200 mailboxes. You can log in with your admin credentials and backup all mailboxes to your local drive. It is AES 256-bit Encrypted, Incremental, and Highly Compressed Backup. It allows you to set the Private Encryption Key for the backup for additional protection for your data. You can try this application for your Exchange and Office 365 Backup.

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