Considerations and Limitations

This section covers configurations and limitations specific for Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365.

Infrastructure and Configuration

1. Installing the product on Windows 2008 operating system is not supported; Windows 2008 R2 SP1 is a minimal supported OS version.
2. Using FAT32 is not recommended due to database size limited to 4GB; NTFS and ReFS are recommended file systems.
3. Requirements and limitations from Microsoft can be found in the following article: https://products.office.com/en-us/office-system-requirements/#Office365forBEG. In particular, it is impossible to modify throttling policies for Exchange Online. If you need to modify these settings, please contact Microsoft technical support.
4. For Microsoft Outlook 2016, the preliminary releases, like Insider releases, or releases provided through Monthly Channel Updates are not supported; Veeam supports only RTM/GA versions of this product. See https://products.office.com/en-us/office-insider?tab=Windows-Desktop and https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Overview-of-update-channels-for-Office-365-ProPlus-9ccf0f13-28ff-4975-9bd2-7e4ea2fefef4?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US to read more.
5. Backup proxy servers and the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 server must be deployed within the same (or trusted) domain.
6. To provide for smooth connection with EWS for data retrieval, make sure that management server and proxy server(s) are not using proxy for the Internet connections.
7. Current version does not support automatic firewall rules creation and ports opening. If any of the required ports is closed, you should open it manually.
8. If you are running Veeam Backup for Office 365 UI (shell) and management server on different machines, then before installing a backup proxy that will be controlled by that management server, make sure that management server is trusted for delegation. See this article for details. If necessary, contact your Active Directory administrator.
9. Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 Service operates only under the local System account. If you want to grant access to any resources to that service, you should do that for the corresponding local computer account. Do not change this account for Veeam service.
10. Symbolic link set as a mapped drive is not supported as repository target in this version.
11. If a Windows machine hosting backup proxy was renamed, this proxy will have the Offline status displayed in the management console. To work around, in the management console remove this proxy from the infrastructure configuration, then configure this proxy anew, targeting at the machine with its new name. Associated repositories will be preserved.
12. If the ProxyDB folder containing proxy configuration database is deleted from a proxy server, this proxy cannot obtain information about its associated repositories any longer. Thus, backup jobs targeted at those repositories will fail with the following error message: “Error: Repository does not exist.” To work around, you need to re-create this proxy.
13. If a proxy goes offline and then back online while processing a backup job, then job session will be displayed with duplicates in the History view and under the Last 24 hours node in the Organizations view.
14. A repository initially associated with the certain backup proxy can be used only by a proxy with the same or higher version of Windows OS. If you try to associate this repository with a backup proxy running an earlier Windows version (for example, after downgrading the proxy server OS due to maintenance reasons), the program will not be able to access the repository data. The error message will be issued saying:
    "Error: JetError -514, JET_errBadLogVersion, Version of log file is not compatible with Jet version".
    The reason is that Jet engine (ESE) differs for different versions of Windows OS. To be able to work with the data backed up by a proxy prior to such maintenance, make sure that the proxy has the same OS version before and after maintenance.
15. IPv6 addressing is not supported for Microsoft Azure China region.
16. Notifications on job results may not work properly for Microsoft Azure China and Germany regions.

Upgrade

1. After upgrading from version 1.0 to 1.5, the nearest scheduled job run is displayed in the console as performing a Full sync, though actually it performs Incremental sync. The amount of transferred data, however, will show that only changes are being synchronized during that job session.
2. If you have edited the Config.xml file for Veeam Backup for Office 365 v1.0 manually, these modifications will not be preserved after the upgrade. For v1.5 you will need to make new custom settings (if necessary).
3. If a job was targeted at the outdated repository, the corresponding message will be displayed when the job starts. To work around the issue, upgrade the outdated repository using the Upgrade command.

Backup

1. Backup of In-Place Hold Items is not supported for on-premises Exchange 2013 due to EWS limitations.
2. If you modify the retention policy tag for a folder, Veeam Backup will perform full synchronization of that folder during the next job run. The reason is that any change to retention policy makes changes to all items in the folder (modifies tag, updates last modification time). Such changes are treated by synchronization mechanism as the new item version, which, in turn, automatically initiates a full sync. To read more, see this TechNet article.

Restore

1. Bulk restore (restore of multiple objects) is not supported for public folders. Use usual (per-object) restore instead.

2. If you want to restore In-Place Hold Items or Litigation Hold Items to the original location (that is, original mailbox system folders), consider the limitations that exist for this kind of restore:

• Restore of In-Place Hold Items is not supported for on-premises Exchange Server 2013 due to EWS limitations.
• To restore In-Place Hold Items of Exchange 2016 mailboxes, these mailboxes must have In-Place Hold enabled and applied at least once, with DiscoveryHolds system folder creation. Otherwise, restore of In-Place Hold Items will fail with an error:
  "Failed to restore In-Place Hold Items. Restore of In-Place Hold Items into Exchange 2013 is not supported".
  For information on enabling In-Place Hold and Litigation Hold, see this Microsoft TechNet article: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff637980(v=exchg.160).aspx
• Currently, Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange does not support browsing and restoring items from the Versions subfolder of the Recoverable Items folder used by In-Place Hold and Litigation Hold to preserve items.

Automation

1. If you want to delete an organization using PowerShell or RESTful API, then you should first disable its backup jobs. To work around, you can delete the organization using management console. Its backup jobs will be deleted automatically.