Preface

This document describes the Teams & Groups backup and restore solution that CloudAlly offers its customers.

Description of Teams & Groups: From Microsoft.com

Groups

Microsoft 365 Groups is the cross-application membership service in Microsoft 365. At a basic level, a Microsoft 365 Group is an object in the Azure Active Directory with a list of members and a coupling to related workloads, including a SharePoint team site, shared Exchange mailbox, Planner, and OneNote notebook. You can add or remove people to and from the group just as you would any other group-based security object in Active Directory.

Teams

When a user creates a Team, a Microsoft 365 group is created to manage team membership. The group's related services, such as a SharePoint site, mailbox, etc. are created at the same time.

When a user creates a team, they can choose to use an existing Microsoft 365 group if they are an owner of that group. Each channel in the team has a separate folder in the document library. Creating folders directly in the document library does not create channels in the team.

When creating a Microsoft 365 group in Outlook or SharePoint, the group mailbox is visible in Outlook. When creating a team in Teams, the group mailbox is hidden by default.

Membership

If you remove a member of a team, they are removed from the Microsoft 365 group as well. Removal from the group immediately removes the team and channels from the Teams client.

If you remove a person from a group using the Microsoft 365 admin center, they will no longer have access to the other collaborative aspects such as SharePoint Online document library, Yammer group, or shared OneNote. However, they will still have access to the team's chat functionality for approximately two hours.

As a best practice for managing team members, add and remove them from the Teams client to ensure that permissions updates for other group-connected workloads occur quickly. If you add or remove team members outside of the Teams client (by using the Microsoft 365 admin center, Azure AD, or Exchange Online PowerShell), it can take up to 24 hours for changes to be reflected in Teams.

Supported Editions

CloudAlly supports all online versions, but we don’t support on-prem.

CloudAlly Backup of Teams & Groups

High Level Description

Introduction

CloudAlly provides its users with separate backup options for each of the Microsoft 365 services: Exchange, Teams & Groups, OneDrive, and SharePoint. But there is overlap between the services. For example, when a user saves files in Teams, they are actually storing it in SharePoint.

Note:    CloudAlly only backs up files once. When using Public channels, the same sites (files) can't be stored twice. They are stored under a SharePoint task or a Teams/Groups task depending on what was activated first. If the user activates a site backup in a SharePoint task, then they will not see the same site in a Teams/Groups task. If the user activates a site backup in a Teams/Groups task, then the same site will be marked as "duplicated" in a SharePoint task - they can't be activated in a SharePoint task.

When using private channels: these sites are always stored in a SharePoint task, and their backups can be activated only in a SharePoint task.

Backup

In general, CloudAlly backs up the following Teams & Groups components:

• Conversations
• Site (SharePoint files)
• Metadata
• Calendars
• Channels

For each of these components, all of the attached files, sites, content structure and related metadata are backed up.

CloudAlly does NOT back up:

• Yammer
• Planner (Tasks)

Restore

In general, CloudAlly restores all of the data and metadata that it backs up.

Limitations

The following features have some backup limitations.

• Recurring calendar events
• Private channels
• Older Backup tasks – there may be problems with:
  • Permissions
  • Empty folders
  • Large files > 500 MB
  • List views on SharePoint sites
  • Files with names containing a # symbol.
• Teams Limitations:
  • Tabs with external applications (e.g., Power BI)
  • Flow triggers. The tabs with the Flow app can be restored to a different destination channel, but the items, like triggers, may be inaccessible from that channel. In a situation like that the triggers are not restored.
  • Applications can be properly backed up 24 hours after they are added to the Team. This is a limitation of the Microsoft API.

Detailed Description

This chapter contains a table of all of the fields within this service, and whether or not we back them up and restore them.

Group Data Types

Whereas Groups are restored to Outlook, Teams are restored to the top of the hierarchy of the Microsoft Teams application.

Group Type

Group Information

Group Mailbox

Conversations

Calendar Events - Appointments and Meetings

Teams Data Types

Message Formatting

Announcements

Additions to a Message or Channel Post