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We are in the process of planning a move to Office 365 and we are planning to implement SSO in the process. We have some emails still on Exchange 2003 servers and we have Exchange 2010. We also have various file stores located on premises that need to be moved to SharePoint. I have some concerns with completely moving email and files to the cloud. I am a strong believer in best practices, so of course I believe in having a proper backup solution, especially for critical services and I want them securely located in-house. I don’t want backups hosted in another companies cloud somewhere.

With that basis, I haven’t been able to find any method to properly back up Exchange online. We think that there are several good solutions out there for SharePoint backups but haven’t found any that will reliably back up Exchange online. Having users save their data locally to PST’s and stuff like that isn’t a viable solution. Is it possible to have a hybrid email deployment with all mailboxes stored on Office 365 and have Exchange online replicate that data down to an Exchange 2010 hybrid deployment that resides in-house? I was thinking that I can back up the local Exchange 2010 systems and in doing so, I would be backing up my email system. Also, if I can use a hybrid Exchange 2010 for my backups, will I be able to have multiple mailbox databases to balance the load (across multiple mailbox servers), CAS/HT servers, EDGE servers, etc.?

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  • Sounds like you should get yourself a message archiver. I should also note that Microsoft does their own backups. You can also create a powershell backup the data yourself. metavistech.com/support/how-to/… talks about some of your choices.
    – Ramhound
    Dec 5, 2013 at 13:08
  • Thanks - MetaVis is one of the contenders we are looking at for SharePoint, but that is only for SharePoint. I need some method to reliably back up Exchange emails from Exchange Online to be stored in-house (terrabytes of data). I haven't found anything who has a product for that. Some companies are working on it but nothing that is currently available. That's why I was hoping that a hybrid Exchange 2010 could be a viable solution for backups. If I used my own Exchange 2010 as an archiving solution, then if we need to move off of Office 365 we already have the infrastructure to do so.
    – SOSidb
    Dec 5, 2013 at 13:22

1 Answer 1

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There are 3 options available here

  1. In-line services or systems that catch mail inbound and outbound. Usually these are store and forward, type services that, and most offer some sort of archiving as well.

  2. API based backup - these hook into Office and download mail. For large enterprises with lots of users this can get pretty intensive.

  3. Rely on Microsoft. Use combination of Legal Holds, Archive mailbox and maybe journaling in some cases (you can't use journaling for explicit backup of mailboxes). Microsoft itself actually doesn't backup Exchange in a traditional sense - they rely on the multiple database copies and lagged copies to keep the data available.

I guess there is technically a 4th option where you users can backup / archive to local PST file.

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