Best Practices and Recommendations

The following are some best practices or recommendations we strongly recommend you to follow before you start any Office 365 Exchange Online backup and restore.

Temporary directory folder is used by CloudBacko Pro for storing backup set index files and any incremental or differential backup files generated during a backup job. To ensure optimal backup/restoration performance, it is recommended that the temporary directory folder is set to a local drive with sufficient free disk space.

Consider the following best practices for optimized performance of the backup operations:

• Enable schedule backup jobs when system activity is low to achieve the best possible performance.
• Perform test restores periodically to ensure your backup is set up and performed properly. Performing recovery test can also help identify potential issues or gaps in your recovery plan. It's important that you do not try to make the test easier, as the objective of a successful test is not to demonstrate that everything is flawless. There might be flaws identified in the plan throughout the test and it is important to identify those flaws.

Office 365 Exchange Online service has set a size limit for individual mail object to be uploaded. Considering the size of the mail object may become larger as a result of the transcoding process when it is being sent out, we strongly recommend you to keep individual mail object no larger than 80MB if you definitely want it to be backed up.

To provide maximum data protection and flexible restore options, it is recommended to configure:

• At least one offsite or cloud destination
• At least one local destination for fast recovery

It is recommended to divide the mailboxes into multiple backup sets. By default, the Office 365 Exchange online backup module can back up a maximum of 4 mailboxes concurrently (4 concurrent backup threads), while backing up a maximum of 4 mail items concurrently per mailbox (4 concurrent backup threads). Therefore, each backup set supports a maximum of 4×4=16 backup threads at a time. By splitting up all mailboxes into separate backup sets, the more backup sets, the faster the backup process can achieve.

Example-1: There are 100 mailboxes needed to be backup, you can divide 20 mailboxes into one backup set.

Example-2: There are 100 mailboxes needed to be backup, you can divide mailboxes into backup sets in alphabetic order.