Considerations and Limitations

This section lists considerations and known limitations in Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365.

Infrastructure

• The Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 REST API Service, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 Service and Veeam Backup Proxy for Microsoft Office 365 Service must be started using the Local System account.
• You cannot change the name of the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 server or change domains of the server without resetting the configuration.
• If the organization has multiple domains, they must be configured as a mesh to cross authenticate to download content from all domains with the service account. For more information, see this Microsoft article.
• Microsoft Windows 2008 operating system is not supported; Windows 2008 R2 SP1 is the minimum supported version.

• Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 does not support encryption at-rest for the following types of backup repositories:

• A local directory on a backup proxy server.
• Direct Attached Storage (DAS) connected to the backup proxy server.
• Storage Area Network (SAN).
• Network Attached Storage (SMB shares version 3.0 or later).

• [For Microsoft Outlook] Update channels such as Beta Channel, Current Channel, or Monthly Enterprise Channel are not supported; Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 supports only RTM/GA versions. For more information, see this Microsoft article.
• If the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 console and a management server are deployed on different machines, make sure that the management server is trusted for delegation. For more information, see this Microsoft article.
• If any of the machines with any of the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 components have been renamed (or its FQDN has been changed), or any machine has been added to a different domain, then all the components become unavailable to each other. If any of the listed has occurred on a server that acts as a backup proxy server, then such a server becomes Offline in the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 console. To make a server available, re-add it. For more information, see Adding Backup Proxy Servers.
• IPv6 is not supported for Microsoft Azure China region.
• Adding Microsoft Office 365 organizations using modern authentication with legacy protocols allowed is not supported for Microsoft Azure China region.
• Adding Microsoft Office 365 organizations using modern app-only authentication is not supported for Microsoft Azure Germany region.
• Microsoft Teams service is not supported for organizations in the Microsoft Azure China and Germany regions.
• Notifications about backup jobs completion results may not work properly for Microsoft Azure China and Germany regions.

Backup Repositories

• Backup repositories with enabled volume deduplication or compression are not supported.
• A symbolic link that is configured as a mapped drive is not supported.

Object Storage Repositories

• Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 does not support the $root container in Azure blob storage.
• Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 does not support Glacier or Lifecycle policy in Amazon AWS Data Management or Azure Archive storage class.
• Make sure the S3 Compatible device you are adding supports AWS S3 Signature Version 4. For more information about authentication requests, see this Amazon article.
• Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 allows you to migrate data from a local backup repository to an object storage repository, but not vice versa. For more information, see the Move-VBOEntityData section of the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 PowerShell Reference.
• Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 does not support object lock for the S3 Compatible bucket.

Backup

• To back up user mailboxes, make sure that a mailbox has a valid Microsoft Office 365 license. Otherwise a backup job will fail with the following error: "Error: Mailbox doesn't have a valid Microsoft Office 365 license".
• To back up public folder mailboxes, the Veeam Backup account must have a valid Exchange Online license and an active mailbox within the Microsoft Office 365 organization.
• To back up SharePoint and OneDrive for Business objects, make sure that a user account has a valid Microsoft Office 365 license with SharePoint plan enabled. Otherwise a backup job will fail with the following error: "User %name% does not have a valid Microsoft Office 365 license with SharePoint plan enabled".
• Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 backs up public folders that are located under the IPM_SUBTREE folder only.
• Project Web Apps are not supported for backup.
• On-premises service accounts cannot be used for multi-factor authentication.
• Backup of In-Place Hold Items is not supported for on-premises Microsoft Exchange 2013.
• You can select only the root public mailbox when backing up public mailboxes. The child folders of the selected public mailbox will be backed up as well.
• If you modify a retention policy tag for a folder, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 will perform full synchronization of that folder during the subsequent backup job session. For more information, see this Microsoft article.
• A SharePoint Site Collection hierarchy is not supported if the root site was not configured. Make sure to configure the root site in advance using a SharePoint site template of your choice. Otherwise, the following error occurs: Error: Failed to find web template ID for: STS#-1. This organization account might be missing a valid SharePoint license. Web configuration is not complete.
• SharePoint site collection recycle bin is not supported for backup.
• When backing up Microsoft Exchange mailboxes, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 does not create a new version of an item the Read/Unread property of which was changed. That said, the Read/Unread property of each of the backed-up items always remains exactly the same as it was during the initial backup.

• When you perform backup of Microsoft Teams data, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 does not back up the following objects:

• Private channels
• One-on-one and group chats

For more information about chats in Microsoft Teams, see this Microsoft article. You can use Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange to explore data from user mailboxes and view chat messages as MSG files.

• Audio and video calls
• Video recordings
• Contacts
• Calendar: information about meetings and meeting chats
• Code snippets in posts
• Banner notifications in posts
• Data of applications added as channel tabs that does not reside in the SharePoint document library of the channel

• As part of Microsoft Teams data backup, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 backs up only the following types of channel tabs: Website, Planner, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, PDF, Document Library, OneNote, SharePoint, Stream, Forms, Power BI, Flow and Azure DevOps.
• Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 cannot backup SharePoint Online sites if their domain names were changed on the Microsoft 365 side.

Mind that the SharePoint domain rename feature is currently available in the Private Preview program and unsupported by Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365. For more information, see this Microsoft article.

• Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 may not backup OneNote notebooks if their size is more than 2 GB. For more information, see this Microsoft article.

Restore

• SharePoint sites with a red X over the symbol mean that there is an empty sector of the template and supported content is available in the subsites.
• Microsoft Teams messages cannot be restored directly back to Teams.

• Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 restores public folders that are located under the IPM_SUBTREE folder only.

• Bulk restore (restore of multiple objects) is not supported for public folder mailboxes. Use the regular per-object restore instead.

• Cross-tenant restore to Microsoft Office 365 is only possible for Exchange Online objects, not for SharePoint sites.

• To restore In-Place Hold Items or Litigation Hold Items to the original location, consider the following:

• Restore of In-Place Hold Items is not supported for on-premises Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 due to EWS limitations.
• To restore In-Place Hold Items of Exchange 2016/2019 mailboxes, these mailboxes must have In-Place Hold enabled and applied at least once with the DiscoveryHolds system folder creation. Otherwise, restore of In-Place Hold Items will fail with the following error: "Failed to restore In-Place Hold Items. Restore of In-Place Hold Items into Exchange 2013 is not supported".

For more information about enabling In-Place Hold and Litigation Hold, see this Microsoft article.

• Restore of OneNote notebooks from backups of Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams data for organizations with modern app-only authentication is not supported.
• Restore of OneNote tabs from backups of Microsoft Teams data may fail with the "Configuration size exceeded. Provided: '4117' bytes MaxAllowed: '4096' bytes" error if the OneNote tab name includes non-Latin or special characters.
• If a SharePoint site includes a hidden list, such list is not displayed in Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint after a site backup and thus, cannot be restored.

Related Topics

• Backup Infrastructure
• Data Backup
• Data Restore