- Welcome to episode 369
of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast
recorded live on January 29th, 2024.
This is a show about Microsoft 365
and Azure from the perspective of it pros
and end users where we discuss a topic or recent news
and how it relates to you.
Microsoft 365 backup
and Microsoft 365 archive have arrived in public preview.
In this episode, we're going to explore these new backup
and archive options for Microsoft 365
and Office 365 workloads, SharePoint, OneDrive
and Exchange in what they have to offer, how to get started
with them and the cost associated
with these new preview services.
Another episode on a Monday morning
because of a teams outage, ,
- You know those global teams outages. Little get you.
- Yeah. It was an adventurous day in Florida
because not only was there a teams outage,
apparently it did not affect me,
but I work with a bunch
of clients down in like the Tampa area
and apparently there was a big spectrum
outage down there as well.
So they were all kinds of confused on
spectrum causing issues as teams causing issues
or both causing issues.
Is one causing issues due to the other one having issues
and it was just a day to just stop working early.
- Yeah, it happens but we're back.
We're into Monday. I got my coffee, I'm ready to go
and talk all about Microsoft 365 back up in archive.
- Yeah, this was a new, well not a new service, a service
that was announced Ignite right this fall like
three, four months ago.
And it is now in a state of public
paid preview I guess would be the official state.
It isn't public preview, it's not ga,
all the things about preview
and you are gonna have to pay for it if you want
to start using this Microsoft 365 backup, which
this service, I think it makes sense that it's paid
because you're backing up data to storage.
You're gonna have to pay for storage. It takes storage.
I'm okay with this one. How's that?
I'm okay with this one being a paid preview. I think
- You know, consumption's consumption
so if if you're gonna hit it, sorry, like you, you,
you are gonna have to pay for that at some point.
Hopefully this ends up being kind of the the max rate
for things we, I'm, I'm sure we'll kind of get into it
and discuss pricing a little bit.
But yeah, you are paying not only to be an early adopter
but certainly paying to across these various things,
be it paying on the backup side
and then you've got the archive offering
as well, which we'll get into. Yeah
- And you get lightning fast ReSTOR ability from Microsoft
to ensure your business continuity with this
Microsoft 365 backup.
So what is Microsoft 365 backup? Scott,
- What is Microsoft 365 backup?
Microsoft 365 backup is
a service which provides you backup
and recovery capabilities for SharePoint inclusive
of OneDrive for Business and Exchange.
And really that's about it.
If you've been thinking about backing up those kinds
of workloads, let's say in like SharePoint land, like I want
to back up a a OneDrive for business site
or I want to back up this team site just to have kind
of a a point in time recovery option for it
or a mailbox, you know, I wanna back up this mailbox
and be able to restore it back
to a certain amount in certain point in time.
That's really what it's all about.
Interesting thing about Microsoft 365 backup
maybe versus some of the other
existing in-market backup offerings for SharePoint
and Exchange, be they Microsoft based third party,
anything like that ISV whatever it is is
that this one is just pego , yeah you kind
of light it up and you pay for storage.
You are not necessarily paying, well not necessarily.
You are not paying per user licensing
for backup capabilities.
So it's basically like hey you're gonna light up this
capability and just pay for storage for it.
And I think that's in stark contrast to some
of the other ISV and
and vendor offerings that are out there today
where you pay kind of per user
and then get a subset of protected items behind that. Yeah,
- It is and it's interesting
because I think some of the ISVs are also starting
to pivot sort of to this. Well
- I think they have to because this is the new model,
this is the new API surface.
Like so if you're working with a vendor
and they go we support Microsoft 365 backup, really
what I would believe them to be saying is
we've adopted the API surface
that Microsoft themselves is using
for their backup offerings.
So ISVs and vendors can build upon the same API surface
and offer not only the same capabilities
but also a super set of capabilities depending on
how they choose to approach it.
- Yeah and even before that, so I have a ISV that I use
for my backup because up
until this point in time there wasn't one
and I believe previously it was pay per user
and it was essentially unlimited backup
of exchange SharePoint OneDrive for that user for
that set price in just this past, I don't know,
it was only in the last like three
or four months, they actually came to me
and said you're exceeding your quota.
Which I didn't know I had
because I don't think I actually had one when I signed up
and it was either, they didn't switch it to a PayGo
but it was either go put in policies to trim off your backup
so you don't keep so much more from a retention standpoint
or start buying additional licenses to cover your storage.
So it was, it was still like per user
but it was you have to go buy extra licenses
for non-existent users if you want to back up more data
because you've exceeded what we give you for the amount
of users you're licensing.
- It's one of those weird sass you run into these edge
cases, not even edge cases.
Like somebody had to have think thought about them
and that they were coming up.
It's just like the way they've chosen
to solve them is weird.
It goes back to the old, you know when you needed more space
for your SharePoint tenant
and how did you allocate space for your SharePoint tenant?
Well you just went and bought space
but that was ultimately a license that needed
to be allocated to a user ,
hey which user do I allocate that license to
because it goes away then we're in trouble. Yeah
- 'cause that was back
and they have since changed it so it,
this is not the case anymore
but I absolutely had that where you,
it was back when you actually bought add-ons under a
specific user and you're right if that user went away,
so did all the add-ons associated with it.
So you either had to have like that global admin account
that wasn't user based that never went away
or if the user ever went away you had to cancel that
and go buy the add-on all over again for another user.
It was super bizarre. Fortunately
that at least has since been fixed. It's
- Those things that you don't think about
until you run into them, right?
Like and I think you see that a lot in this spaces.
Folks are kind of sort of like testing the market
and poking just as they go. Yeah.
- So going back to Microsoft 365 backup,
like you said OneDrive, SharePoint Exchange,
they do have something on the website that says
Microsoft Teams is coming soon
because all your teams files are stored in SharePoint.
I'm assuming this is more related
to things like maybe chats, conversations.
It'll be interesting to see what is included in teams.
And I'm also curious to see as this continues,
what else they add?
Because last Friday I did a presentation
on backup and restore
and some of the challenges you run into with Microsoft 365
and how to account for 'EM
and OneDrive, SharePoint exchange teams are great
but what a lot of people also don't think about is
what am I doing for planner plans
and what am I doing for power apps and power Automate
and all of my files and emails are great
but what if somebody goes in
and deletes all my users in Azure AD
and then deletes my deleted users in Azure AD
and I no longer have user accounts there
or I lose conditional access policies, Intune policies,
configuration policies, compliance policies,
like there's a lot of stuff in Microsoft 365
that isn't backed up really by Microsoft 365 backup
or for that matter any of the ISVs.
So it will be interesting to see if this expands
and if this truly becomes like a all-inclusive backup
or where this goes over time
because when I hear Microsoft 365 backup my mind goes to,
I would love to see them back up a whole lot more than just
these really three verticals, right?
Because OneDrive is SharePoint.
So really we're talking SharePoint exchange and teams.
- That's part of the part of the things I look to Microsoft
for as a, as a vendor, right?
Like they're the creator of the stack.
Like they're going to be able to do things along the way
that other vendors in the ecosystem can't do
'cause they're not the service owners.
So I would hope that this becomes more
holistic coverage over time.
I don't know how that is going to necessarily
manifest within the services themselves.
So if you talk about things like planner,
planner doesn't really have a backup mechanism
nor a restore mechanism today.
So you need this whole other surface to kind of exist first.
Like what's important in planner plans to restore?
Is it the entire plan? Is it individual items within a plan?
Is it only individual items
that are like tagged in a certain way?
Like I can see how it's hard to rationalize some of that
and put it together and figure out like hey what's the
offering that customers actually need there?
Like a lot of this stuff almost comes down
to you almost want like a magic snapshot button
for your tenant inclusive of all the data in it so
that you could potentially go back
and roll back to a point in time there
or within granularity of
of a given service be it something like planner
or users OneDrive
or whatever it happens, whatever it happens to be.
I think the other thing you gotta figure out here is
does backup make sense for you
and your workload given the way your users use the service,
the pricing for backup
and the functionality that it brings along the way.
So you might find that backup is
a little inflexible.
So like let's take like M 365 backup
in the just retention model alone for it.
So you can do 10 minutes, it's 10 minutes snapshots,
basically like 10 minute backups is your frequency
for backups and then you get a year of retention
and none of that is currently modifiable there.
Like do you actually need that?
And if you don't actually need a year,
like maybe you just need
to get better about things like
recycle bins within the service.
You know that maybe doesn't help you on the exchange side
but if SharePoint's your core concern
and core workload, maybe that's where you're looking to go.
There's a whole lot of kind of mental overhead
and potentially like TCO math that folks need to do
to sit down
and figure out if M 365 backup versus
another vendor's backup offering versus no backup
and it's just a service that's
provided to me is the way to go
and kind of how they choose to live their lives.
- I agree and this is another one I wanna see where it goes,
but it is preview, like you said one your retention
and I had this question during my presentation too.
Someone asked, asked, they were like, well
how much backup is enough?
How often should I be backing stuff up?
Like I don't really know.
It's kind of like your corporate policies, right?
Sometimes you have that
- Is very situationally dependent. Yeah
- You can have regulations
or different compliance requirements of
you need backup data for this long or even
after so much time you don't want
your backups around anymore.
It gets into a little bit of that tension I would say
between retention and retention policies
and backup of you have retention policies in place
for eDiscovery but we've talked about this
before with certain retention policies.
The goal is also to delete content
after a certain amount of time
because if you have it around you can still be liable
for producing it in court cases, that type of stuff.
And how do you balance that even with backup is
Microsoft 365 backup one year retention can't change it.
It is what it is. What if you want
stuff deleted sooner than that?
You only want backups for six months
or you have to keep it longer Or even
how does those retention policies
and backup all play together?
Because if you have retention policies
to intentionally delete stuff
after seven years, I'm thinking financial data in the US
what if your backup is sticking around for 10 years?
That was one question somebody asked me
and I'm like I don't really know.
It's like you said, it's very situational.
I mean personally for me,
unless one year seems like a good amount of time,
I very rarely find myself in a situation whether it be
Microsoft 365
or my date on my devices
where I don't realize I accidentally deleted something
and it's like two years later
and I'm gonna go back through my backups and try to find it.
I think one year is a good place to start.
I think it would be nice to see them expand on that.
Especially given the model that we talked about
where this is very much paper storage.
If I choose to keep this data for 10 years, I'm gonna pay
for this quantity of data
because I'm keeping it around for longer.
So it'll be interesting again, see if this is one
of those just preview limitations.
They wanna see how it goes, they're testing stuff out
and they'll start opening up some of these retentions,
the frequency and I,
that one I can see being a little bit tougher to change
but frankly every 10 minutes seems pretty quick to me.
And then even some of the restore points and all of that
or your RTO, the time to recover those options too. I
- Think the RT o's interesting so Microsoft as a
vendor here and kind of the purveyor of the APIs for this
offering are kind of uniquely positioned
to make some of that stuff happen.
So I think when they talk about things like faster restores,
you know part of it is it's like they can do it
because they are the vendor and
and they have that capability
to say position the storage closer to the workload,
those underlying APIs and
and how they actually orchestrate restorations like
that can all be orchestrated on the backend
and push through to where it needs to be.
It's a little bit of a different offering I think.
You know another thing that folks might want to kind
of think about and rationalize along the way is
where your backups actually like live within this scenario
and how that comes together as well.
So in this case, like you're backing up to some storage
that you don't really have insight into like backup up,
the way it manifests today in M 365, like if you went
and signed up for this preview is you're basically gonna go
and turn it on.
Like you say yep, I'm gonna do PayGo billing for this.
You flip a switch
and you say yep, I'm turning on M 365 backup.
And then you start just creating policies kind
of per service
or I guess per offering, so be it OneDrive,
SharePoint exchange, you're gonna go
and configure policies for each of those, turn those on
and then you are off to the races.
So you know, so far Microsoft hasn't given the capability
to be able to offload
to say like your own storage be it like say like a storage
account in your subscription
in your Azure subscription, something like that.
Or even to be able to like download those backups
and take them off to another site or anything like that.
So kind of the way it works today is you go turn it on,
your data starts backing up,
it does stay within geographic boundaries.
So M 365 has all of its trust boundaries for
where data stays.
Say say you're like a European customer,
you know you're gonna stay in the eu, that kind of thing.
Data residency will be insured, all that good stuff.
- Like you said, it really is easy to go turn it on.
You can do all this in the gui.
I know sometimes Microsoft rolls things out where you have
to use PowerShell first
and the policies, going back to
what we said earlier are pretty straightforward.
If you're a SharePoint admin
or a global admin, you can set 'em up for SharePoint,
global admins Exchange admins can set 'em up for exchange.
But these policies,
because you're kind of limited right now on frequency
and on retention and all of that, it's you go pick OneDrive,
you go pick SharePoint, you pick exchange,
whoever you wanna set that policy up for.
Go set the scope. So are we backing up certain sites,
certain mailboxes
or you can set up that scope to where it is
set based on like,
and I don't know how this works for SharePoint.
I have not gone in
and I, I bet you don't get these options for SharePoint,
for OneDrive, for exchange.
You can actually do it based on distribution lists
or security groups.
So all the users on this particular list,
this particular security groups.
If you do have some differences, maybe
as more options become available based on the users, uh,
you also do have an option to do like an import from A CSV
and then once you select who it is you're going to back up.
It really is just going and turning it on.
There's no, how frequently is this gonna be backed up?
How long is it gonna be retained for?
Because those are just hard coded right now to 10 minutes
for exchange, 15 minutes for OneDrive
and SharePoint for that RPO as long
as it's in the first 14 days.
And this is another interesting thing right,
is you'll be able to go back 15 minute increments up
to the last two weeks after you hit those 14 days.
Those two weeks exchange actually does stay
with a 10 minute RPO
for the entire year versus SharePoint
where once you get past those initial two weeks, your
recovery points for days 15 through 365 are gonna be a week.
And all of this stuff is really just set in stone right now.
This is what it is, you take it when you set up your
policies and that's gonna be how it's going to be set up
and backed up under these policies.
So again, really straightforward
to configure at this point in time.
Really just a next, next select the users, the sites
and turn it on and you're off to the races.
- I guess beyond the recovery point kind of piece
that you made, there's also recovery time
and recovery time starts
to vary a little bit too depending on what you're restoring.
So kind of the general guidance today is a 30 gig mailbox
would recover in less than one hour
and you can kind of get from there
after that it could take up to 12 hours,
I'm gonna say up to 12 hours
'cause the documentation says less than 12.
Less than 12 feels a little bit different than up to 12.
'cause it could be up to 12,
- Less than 12 sounds shorter.
It's kinda like labeling something
with 99 cents instead of the even dollar.
- A little bit of marketing there.
But yeah, so mailboxes like the first restore is gonna be
less than an hour, could be a little bit more
for subsequent restores just as things come down.
SharePoint sites are the same way.
So general guidance they've got out now is 30 gigs less than
an hour and then say you're restoring like a thousand
sites in that same thing.
So the first one less than an hour subsequent ones
could take a little bit, uh, little bit more
but hopefully the entire operation like they've targeted
some pretty aggressive times for those.
So like they're saying like a thousand sites in less
than 12 hours.
They're also saying a thousand mailboxes,
like on average 30 gigs less than 12 hours
to bring those back.
So this was a little funny to me too.
You mentioned like Gooeys to turn it all on,
it's also gooeys to manage it all today at least as far
as even doing restores and things like that.
So you kind of just go into the gooey
and you say, all right, here's my recovery point, you know,
browse by datetime, get to the point you wanna be
and then you just click the button
and you say whether you're going back
to the original location or a new destination
and you're done.
Like you're just off to the races.
So very much like the simple, simple, simple view
of backup today, I don't know that that's a bad thing,
you know given the customer base
and where things are at, like accessibility is probably
way easier for this than lots of other admin tasks
that you would have to do within the stack.
- I like keeping it simple like that. I have no problems.
Again, it would be nice to see at least retention maybe
change down the road but I don't know
that you need a whole lot more than
what they have right now.
So I'm with you. I like the simple,
I like the way it's set up at least for now.
I'm sure there will be more stuff that gets added,
gets updated, gets changed in the future.
I feel like there was something else I was gonna say
and it's completely gone now. We should
- Probably, before we move on to archive,
we should probably talk pricing for this one real quick
'cause it is a little bit of a
different pricing model. Yeah
- And one thing you did mention that I do like is they do
give you that option too to restore to a different location.
So if you do wanna restore
to a different SharePoint site versus the original one,
it's nice to see that built into this preview as well.
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so you can focus on your business Pricing.
This one's interesting. We were talking about this a little
bit before the show
and like you mentioned it is pay
per gigabyte in terms of backup storage
and my article is not,
it is 15 cents per gigabyte backed up
and they have a pricing calculator for this.
I should go over here, I do not have it,
which actually just brings you to a shared Excel spreadsheet
for the pricing calculator,
but it is 15 cents bringing gigabyte backed up
and then I believe there was pricing two on the restore
and I am drawing a big blank here on terms of
where I jotted that down or where I saw that. Where'd
- It go?
I know archive had a restore price.
I don't remember it for backup off the top of my head.
- Backup. It doesn't look like it.
Backup is just 15 cents per gigabyte per month.
We'll go with that. I think it was archive.
So this is interesting to me Scott
and we were talking about it
because SharePoint storage not backup like hot storage,
keep it in a SharePoint site is 20 cents
per gigabyte per month.
So backup, yes it is saving, saving you some
but it is not saving you.
I would say it's not saving you as much as I maybe
anticipated it would.
Also given the pricing,
and this is
where my head initially went when we first started talking
about it, is you look at something like Azure blob storage
where your Azure blob storage pricing is
less than 10 cents per month
for most types of storage.
Again, you get into some
of the premium versus hot versus cool versus cold.
The what we were talking about the different redundancy
options and blob storage and I think I looked at that
and I looked at even things like a
locally redundant storage,
which we talked about probably not a good idea for backup,
but that colder cool storage where I tend
to like back up my files is 1 cent
to less than a cent per gigabyte
and I'm like man, 15 cents for SharePoint seems expensive.
But then you pointed out some things
and I'm curious your thoughts on this as well,
especially given some of your storage experience in thinking
through why it might be that pricing model
or some of the reasons I still don't know that we came up
with 15 cents, but it's, it's interesting. I
- Think the first thing you have to keep in mind is,
and it's easy to fall into this trap,
is you're coming at it from the lens
of oh they're charging me x cents per gigabyte for storage.
Yep. You immediately go in your head
to well what's the price that I can get for storage
and other other places?
The problem with that is it's not just X sense a gigabyte
for storage, it's X sense a gigabyte plus hosting the API
surface plus doing all the r and d and the the dev
and all the other things that go on top of it, right?
So there's some component in there that like,
yeah you're paying for it because it's part of the service
and it costs money to host
and like what's that infrastructure look like?
So like in this case for backup,
you're not like giving it your own storage account
or pointing it to a NAS
or anything like that in your environment.
Like it's just click a button, turn it on and it's there.
Which means somebody else, Microsoft in this case with
with their offering is in the background doing some things
like they've probably gotta go provision more storage,
they've gotta go light things up, they've gotta make sure
that it meets the the promises of the service when it comes
to things like durability
and how that composes like you might be looking at just like
an LRS storage account where if you look at like M 365,
the way I think about M 365
and like the way it manifests as a service,
especially within like a geo again like let's take the EU
or the U US or something like that is,
it's not really like LRS at all.
It's not really ZRS, it's something like plus ,
you know, where your data can kind
of like live in a geo across a geo.
So clearly there's other I think things
that have been done there that just manifest in the service
and then they kind of cost money along the way
and then somebody needs to make money on it.
That's the other stark reality
and I don't know like what that looks like and,
and you know what people's margins are
and their targets and all those kinds of things.
But at the end of the day like the price is the price
and that's where they landed.
So you know, you as a customer really do need to go out
and kind of figure out like hey what's the TCO in
this offering for me?
Like is it worth it in its current form as it manifests
with its set of capabilities?
Like do you want to continue
with like your third party backup provider
or do you wanna go to this
or do you wanna potentially do some mix of both?
Right? Is there a subset where you can create a set
of policies and
and make those kinds of things work
and come together? I don't know. Yeah,
- I mean maybe that's part of it too is maybe you end up
with a mix of this and a third party.
I think the advantage of maybe a third party is some
of these third parties do give you the option
of I wanna back this up to AWS or I'm going to blob storage
and I will say with those you're probably not going to get,
or what I've seen and it'll be interesting
to see is these third parties start using this new API
that's a part of Microsoft 365 backup
because they could also build their solutions on it is
you're not able to get the speed the RTO
and the RPO of in third parties
that you can in Microsoft 365.
So there could be that argument of there's certain sites
where I don't need the frequency
or the speed in my restore, so maybe I use a third party
for some of my sites and I use the Microsoft 365 backup
because like we said, you can't select them for more
of those business critical sites
where you do want a faster RPO and RTO.
This one will be an interesting one
to watch over time to see where it goes.
I don't know that I'm gonna switch from a third party yet.
I look at the cost of backup for me
and what my requirements are
and I start comparing like,
I mean I have a fair amount of data in my tenant.
I am several hundred gigabytes even for me backing up,
let's say it's 500 gigabytes at 15 cents a month,
that's $75 a month over the course of a year.
That's $900 for my backup.
I think right now I'm paying in the realm of like two
to 300 a year.
So this is like three times what I'm paying now,
but I don't have the integration into the admin interface.
I definitely don't have the backup speed.
I'm lucky to get once a day backups I think is
what I get now and included in that I think my,
I think I have a terabyte of backup
for like the four licenses I have.
So this is definitely one of those that you really like.
A lot of things should evaluate your requirements,
what you need, what you don't need, the cost associated
with it and is it worth it for you. I
- Know nobody likes to sit down in front
of a pricing calculator
but somebody's gotta sit down in front
of a pricing calculator for this one. Moving
- On, that was backup archive.
This is yeah, archive.
So this is somewhere between archive, between archive
between live storage and backup.
Backup like we talked about.
It's somebody deleted all my data, ransomware got in,
synchronized all my content up, all my emails are gone,
I need to restore from somewhere else.
Archive on the other hand.
And Microsoft 365 archive is going
into more just SharePoint for this one.
So this one is not going across exchange or other services.
This is geared towards SharePoint
archiving your content in place.
So older data we talked about with backup, some
of the retention stuff after a year,
I'm no longer using this data or this is for an old client.
I feel like me, I have teams
or SharePoint sites for all the different clients.
Some of those clients I haven't worked
with in three or four years.
I'm not in a backup scenario
but I'm more in that inplace archive.
I wanna maybe not pay the full price
for my SharePoint storage
and I just wanna go put this somewhere
where it's a little bit cheaper to store it so
that I can get to it, restore it, pull
that data back at some point in time in
the future if I want it.
And again, this is only SharePoint
because Exchange has a had archive for a while.
Now the online archive that's included
with your exchange mailboxes.
I can be another topic of if that will remain
or if that somehow gets rolled into this in the future.
But today this is Microsoft 365 archive is SharePoint
only for that purpose.
- The way I like to think about these, like if you're trying
to balance them in in your head
and you're, you go okay there's backup over here,
there's archive over here, like
what the heck is the difference?
I think one of the kind of things
to key in on is you mentioned in place
and archive is effectively an in place archive versus
something like a backup,
which even though it's abstracted away from you is kind
of taking your data out of the surface.
Uh, service. So those backups are stored
in a, in a different place.
Now there's some operational benefits
to archive versus backup here.
So one is gonna be even faster like it is, you know
to the degree it can be even faster on things like
being able to perform a restoration
or rehydration from archive.
There's no difference in the security
domain, which I think is big.
Like you never have to worry about crossing some
external boundary or anything like that.
Like it is all just in the service native.
And then the other cool thing about archive versus something
like backup is in archive land your,
at least the way it works with SharePoint archive today
or M 365 archive,
which is four SharePoint sites today is your search indices
remain in place.
So if you go ahead
and you archive content,
end users will lose the ability to search.
But admins retain the ability
to search within those indices, which is kind of nifty
and kind of powerful I think within this
as a service offering.
So if you're going out and say doing like a compliance
search or something like that,
you're still gonna be covered on the
archive site to get that out.
So it's really kind of nifty.
It's, it's all a native construct within the service.
Like if you go ahead
and you archive a site, when you rehydrate
that site it gets rehydrated.
There's no loss of metadata, no loss of security versioning,
like any of that stuff.
It just comes back because it's SharePoint
and SharePoint knows SharePoint.
So I think they did kind of a, a really good job
building out like that piece of the service
and getting it to a point where it just, it makes sense.
Now you could run into some weirdness along the way like you
know, this is back archive for SharePoint sites.
Not all sites are supported,
like not all site templates are are out there supported
today and yeah your,
your mileage might vary a little bit along the way.
I imagine they improve coverage coverage there.
Another big difference between this
and backup is we mentioned backup, like you just kind
of just go turn it on and pay for it with archive
before you can turn on Pego billing for archive you have
to have an Azure subscription and an Azure resource group
and those need to be provisioned prior
to turning on the M 365 archive service.
- And that was interesting to me as well.
Also given like when we talked about backup, this indicates
that almost archive is using some of
that Azure storage on the backend
for the archive like it versus backup
where you're not using an Azure subscription.
So it must be going someplace
else would be maybe my assumption
and maybe again some of those differences in prices
and even when you start looking through some
of the documentation, it references things like archive is
going to a cooler storage, whether that's cool storage
and Azure blob or not, I don't really know.
I haven't gone in and turned this on yet.
I would imagine that you're not actually able
to see anything in that resource group
that somehow this is tied to an Azure subscription.
The fact that you need an Azure resource group means
that I would assume something in here is going into
that resource group, some resource is getting created,
somehow the data's going in there
and that you're then getting charged
based on the data going in there.
It's, it's interesting
to see the differences in these building models, the
- Joys of hosted on behalf of Yeah,
you would be amazed at the amount of stuff that gets lit up
inside like say your Azure subscriptions that you can't see
that potentially come from like another
service or something like that. ,
- I am sure.
So this one as well, once you get
that Azure subscription set up similar you need global admin
or SharePoint admin for this one
and you go turn this all on in the admin center,
turn it off in the admin center.
That's really all there is to it from a setup perspective.
That's it. Yeah, it's look at basic,
- You kind of turn it on, you start getting billed
and then if you want to turn it off,
just make sure you rehydrate everything first.
So we should also mention
that there's effectively a rehydration fee
associated with this as well.
Like when you're bringing items back from archive.
So you know,
you talked about like SharePoint storage being just 20 cents
a gig and we talked about backup being
15 cents a gig a month.
Now archive is 5 cents a gig a month
and that's in start contrast to like that 20 cents a gig.
So you're getting some material savings there. Yep.
But the reactivation of archive data,
if it passes the seven day mark,
you'll pay 60 cents a gigabyte effectively to rehydrate
that archived item and get it up to where it needs to be.
So another another thing that you'll need to account
for in like your TCO calculations for something like archive
is how often you actually rehydrate or intend to rehydrate.
- I like this one more. So this one actually excites me more
about than backup because I did have other options
for backup and this might also be some
of the pricing differences that we see here is,
to your point, you do need to rehydrate, you pay
to rehydrate but your rehydration here is not
as fast as those backups are.
So really your backups probably also have
to be sitting on a higher tier storage with faster io,
faster bandwidth, all of that when you're doing backup
versus these archives, you can go into cheaper storage
because it's not gonna come back as fast when you go choose
to rehydrate this data.
I can't remember what it was,
but I wanna say it was, I was just looking
through the documentation here on if it actually says
how long it will take to come
back don't but I wanna say it was
- Like hours. I don't remember seeing
- Anything. I don't either.
- All I remember seeing is very fast.
'cause you're effectively like in place.
It's it's, it's more like a
snapshot versus an offloaded backup is kind
of the way I was thinking about it in my head as I was going
through and looking at the way you light it up the way
restores orchestrated.
I guess rehydration are orchestrated across.
- I don't see that in the documentation yet on
when you do rehydrate, how long it will take.
I was just looking through it all here. Yep.
Legal hold can be archived, content admin, searchable.
Yeah, there's nothing on how long it'll take to come back,
but I think this is again two different use cases
so you can't really compare and contrast these two.
But I feel like there's a lot of clients that I've worked
with that they actually care more about this.
They have data, it's like a file server, right?
You tend to, as you're using SharePoint more
and as it's been around now for, well SharePoint online
as it's been around now for know 12, 13 years,
maybe even a few more, maybe even 14 or 15.
Uh, clients are starting to get some of that.
Or clients I work with are starting to get some of
that older data out there.
It's 10 years old, it's 12 years old, even five
or six years old that they don't need it anymore.
Uh, but they still wanna keep it
and some of those people have started to pay
for the 20 cents per gigabyte just to have some place
to keep this data long term
where they can still get it if they need it, moving it out
to the 5 cents, having
to pay 60 cents per gigabyte to restore it.
This to me is also a good argument
for making sure you do your taxonomy and SharePoint, right?
, you don't wanna archive a one terabyte
or 250 gigabyte SharePoint site
because you decided to put everything in a single site
or at a single location.
If you bucket out your content properly, hopefully these
restores or not the restores
but the rehydration of data aren't going to cost you as much
because you're able to rehydrate them in smaller batches.
I didn't see, it looks like this is site based.
I was just thinking as I was saying that,
I'm like did we ever look at if this was folder
file based, site based?
- It's site based. - It is site based.
So I have clients, we've talked about this Scott,
we've done some of our storage episodes
where it's like do not migrate a file share
to a single SharePoint site.
There's a multitude of reasons not to do that.
Or don't put all your files in one SharePoint site,
like really think through,
break these out into different SharePoint sites,
think through that taxonomy.
This would be a another reason to really think through that.
So if you do wanna archive
and rehydrate you're rehydrating megabytes
or maybe it's 10 20 gigabytes instead of,
well now I can't archive because everything is in one site
or when I do have to rehydrate, it's just a massive site.
I'm rehydrating in
that 60 cents per gigabyte can add up in a hurry
- More to plan about in the future, right?
Like I think folks are gonna kind of figure out as they go
and over the next six months a year you'll start
to see far more like tactical guidance come out
around these things like hey, here's how to approach it.
Here's how to maybe save money with this.
Here's how to figure out like what is important to backup,
what is important to archive, what's not important
to back up, what's not important to archive?
All those conversations are gonna kind
of keep on coming over the course of the next, you know,
six months to a year as folks
get more and more hands-on with it.
And as we start to see what type
of vendor offerings are built out on top of this, right?
We've still got SharePoint premium
and all the things that come along with that
and kind of the syntax rebrand.
There's backup
and archive kicking around out here right now.
Like there's all these new API surfaces.
I think it's gonna take folks a little bit of time just
to wrap their heads around
and figure out what the next steps are.
- Yep. And if you do wanna track these,
we'll put these links in the show notes as well.
There is a roadmap,
Microsoft 365 roadmap item for each of these.
Archive is feature ID 1 7 1 1 0 0
and again public preview.
Now they do have a rollout date starting
of March, 2024 for archive
and then backup is 1 8, 8 7, 9, 9 public preview now
and they have that rollout date starting in April of 2024.
So archive should hit GA first in March, backup
a month later in April of 2024.
- They'll be here before you know it.
- Yes. And I have not hit my
provided storage yet, so I actually
don't need to worry about archive.
But for any of you that are paying for extra storage,
I would keep an eye on archive especially
and think through that data that you have out there
and how it's architected
because you may be able to stop paying the 20 cents per gig
and start paying 5 cents per gig
and archive off a bunch of that older data.
It would, yeah. There is PowerShell too,
so you can't set the archive status.
There's a lot of things you could start doing
with this Scott, with PowerShell, with Power Automate
to run scripts to archive it.
It would be nice to see some connectors built in.
I am definitely more excited to play with archive than I am
to put backup if I had to pick one of these too. Yeah,
- Backup seems to be one
of those fairly mature places already.
Like you've already had options as a customer, so good, good
that now you have more options, potentially easier
to sit it out and wait and see how it forms out over time.
But the archive thing, like you said, like there,
there's meaningful savings to be had there depending on
how you approach governance of your SharePoint sites today.
- Oh well that Scott, we should probably wrap up.
This one got a little longer with all the,
- Probably it happens.
- Details are on backup in archive. It does, but always fun.
Always fun looking at these new features, trying
to figure 'em out, use cases, all of those. Sounds
- Good. Thanks
- Ben.
Alright, thank you. Enjoy your Monday
and we will talk to you later.
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