Many will agree that SharePoint is a very feasible solution for organizations. It allows them to accomplish their goals through increased collaboration, easy access to information, business workflow, and more. What is even better is that organizations can experience all of it without investing in the infrastructure required to host it on premise. Instead, they can subscribe to SharePoint Online where they rely on Microsoft to manage the infrastructure. The only caveat is the backup and restore capability.
SharePoint Online Backup Limitations
With SharePoint online, the site collection backups are performed every 12 hours and are kept for 14 days. Additionally, the way to restore a site collection would be to submit a request to Office 365 support and it could take up to two days for the restore to be completed. When the restore is done, it replaces the previous site collection. This prevents organizations from creating a copy of their site collections for testing or development purposes.
In developing our client’s SharePoint Online sites, we were faced with the aforementioned limitations and thus scoured the various 3rd party options that will provide us with the functionality we needed.
At first we found LeapBackup. It was mentioned in many of the boards as one of the products that many people use. They advertise that it is simple, affordable and easy to setup. All of which is accurate. However, for our needs, it was a tad bit too simple. Therefore, we began our search again.
Potential SharePoint Online Backup Solutions
This time we found DocAve Online by AvePoint. We have just begun our trial of this product. However, we are very impressed with the functionality it provides!
We are able to configure very granular backups, restore to new site collections, manage content and get very detailed reports. It also is very cost effective at only $1 per user per month. With the subscription, you benefit from all the new features that are added to the product – no additional maintenance cost. DocAve is also available for on-premise solutions.
Once we have finished our testing, I will post more details as well as our thoughts on DocAve Online. In the meantime, I encourage you to take a look at it for yourself. I trust that you will find that it will meet your SharePoint backup needs and much more.