Best way to backup an Office 365 mailbox locally?
Solved Cloud & Migration
AJ
Andrew Jackson
September 19, 2019
2 replies
8,560 views
Reviewed by moderators

Microsoft's shared responsibility page makes it clear they do not back up our mailbox content in any restore-friendly way. 40 users on Business Standard. What do people actually use for local Microsoft 365 mailbox backup?

Accepted Answer
Verified by David Taylor, Community Expert ยท Reviewed September 2019

Three tiers people run in practice:

1
Per user manual: Outlook export to PST. Free, fine for one mailbox, unmanageable at 40.
2
eDiscovery export from the compliance center. Free and complete but clunky and not built for schedules.
3
SysTools Office 365 Backup: admin credentials, select all 40 mailboxes, scheduled incremental runs to local PST. This is the set-and-forget tier.

Whichever tier, keep the output on storage you control plus one offsite copy.

Tier 3 with nightly incrementals to the NAS and weekly sync offsite. Finally covered. Solved.