Knowledge Base

SkyKick - Restoring Office 365 Exchange Data

Note:
The information contained in this article has been provided by Cloud Direct's partner, SkyKick.

This article shows how to restore Office 365 Exchange data, when it has been previously backed up by SkyKick Cloud Backup. The process has essentially two steps; search for the data to restore, and then restore it. These are explained in this article.

  • Search for the data to restore
    • Mailbox Folder View
    • Search to find
    • Browse to find
  • Restore
    • Individual Item Restore
    • Full Restore
    • Restore Individual Contacts
    • Restoring a file when a folder has been deleted
    • Restoring mailbox data after a user leaves, and their Office 365 subscription is deleted

 

Search for the data to restore

To restore lost data in Exchange, navigate to the subscription, and click the Exchange tab to reveal a list of Individual Mailboxes. If it is a large subscription, containing many mailboxes, then use the Search field to find the mailbox you want to search.

To search a mailbox, click the User name to open that user's mailbox in Folder View.

Mailbox Folder View

From here, you can either enter text into the Search field, or browse through the folder Name column to find what you want to restore.

Search to find

Enter keywords from the header of the email or the name of the folder you are looking for. Cloud Backup searches the subject line of emails, file and folder names, contact names, and more. However, to ensure privacy, it does not search the body of emails or files. To narrow your search, you can use the following Smart Search tags:

  • To:[Recipient Name]
  • From:[Sender Name]
  • Subject:[Subject Keyword]

Cloud Backup also supports a variety of Advanced Search capabilities, including Elasticsearch, Wildcards, and RegEx. 

Note:
For more information, see KB0012379, SkyKick - Advanced Search.

If multiple items appear in your search, you can sort the items by Attachment, Sent by, Subject, and Date.

Browse to find

You can also click any folder or sub-folder to browse its contents, sort the items by Attachment, Sent by, Subject, and Date, and filter by Date.

  • To sort, click the column heading you want to sort by.
  • To filter by date, click the filter icon and select an option.

As you drill into folders, your path is tracked at the top of the screen. If you want to navigate back, simply click on the path to open a menu, and select the folder you want to return to.

 

Restore

Individual Item Restore

To restore individual folders or items, tick the appropriate checkbox to select the folder or item, then click Restore.

While the restore is initiated with a single click and Cloud Backup makes every effort to restore the content as quickly as possible, the time required to complete the restoration is based on a variety of external factors, including:

  • The overall size of the data set being restored.
  • Microsoft Office 365 throttling.
  • Microsoft Azure throttling.
  • The overall availability of Office 365.

During this time, you can view the status of the restore by hovering over the progress indicator next to the mailbox being restored.

Full Restore

Cloud Backup also supports bulk restore of Full Mailboxes and Calendar, as well as all Contacts, Tasks, Notes, or Journals. On the homepage of the Exchange tab, click the ellipsis (...) to the right of any mailbox, and select what you want to restore.

Currently, the only full restore that appears on the homepage of the Exchange tab for a Shared Mailbox is Restore Full Mailbox. However, within any mailbox type, you can perform a full restore of Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Notes, and Journals, by selecting the folder in the Folder View.

When a full restore is done with Cloud Backup, it is merged with existing content. In other words, the data is de-duplicated before it is inserted into the mailbox. Cloud Backup does not overwrite or delete data at any time.

While the restore is initiated with a single click, and Cloud Backup makes every effort to restore the content as quickly as possible, the time required to complete the restoration is based on a variety of external factors, including:

  • The overall size of the data set being restored.
  • Microsoft Office 365 throttling.
  • Microsoft Azure throttling.
  • The overall availability of Office 365.

During this time, you can view the status of the restore by hovering over the progress indicator next to the mailbox being restored.

Restore Individual Contacts

You can restore contacts individually or in bulk from the Folder View of the mailbox.

  1. Click the Contacts folder

A list of Contacts appears.

  1. Tick the appropriate checkboxes to select the contacts you want to restore.
  2. Click Restore.

Restoring a file when a folder has been deleted

Cloud Backup will re-create the folder architecture and restore the file in that recreated folder architecture. However, if someone has deleted the site collection, the Global Admin will need to recreate the site collection manually before hitting restore on the file.

Restoring mailbox data after a user leaves, and their Office 365 subscription is deleted

Cloud Backup will not delete the backup of the mailbox, and the content will be retained for the duration of the retention period (as indicated in the Settings section of an Office 365 Backup subscription). If the Office 365 license has been removed (thus deleting the mailbox from Office 365), this will trigger an alert titled: Backup [mailbox] not found. To address this alert, you will need to disable the backup for the mailbox. Once the mailbox is disabled, you will no longer be charged for the mailbox and the alert will not pop up again.

To maintain the integrity of the mailbox, while removing the need to have it licensed, Microsoft's best practice is to convert the mailbox to a Shared Mailbox first, and then remove the license. By doing this, instead of simply removing the license and deleting the mailbox, no mailboxes will need to be created if the customer wants to restore the data. The backups can still be turned off for that mailbox, resulting in no further charges.

Note:
Disabling the backup of a mailbox will not delete the backed-up data. Search and restore is available while the subscription is active.