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Microsoft 365 Backup Costs Based on Per Gigabyte of Protect Content
In my last article about Microsoft 365 Backup, I explained that I liked the ease of use of the product but had problems restoring data to SharePoint Online sites and OneDrive for Business accounts. Here I want to discuss the cost of using Microsoft 365 Backup (preview).
Microsoft charges for backups on a pay as you go basis at a rate of $0.15/month per gigabyte of protected content. The costs are paid through an Azure subscription The documentation includes a calculator to help estimate how much it will likely cost to use Microsoft 365 backup. An essential part of that is to know the size of the sites, accounts, and mailboxes chosen for backup.
Getting Sizes for Protected Content
Storage usage information for workloads can be obtained using PowerShell cmdlets or the Graph usage reports API. Unhappily, some problems prevent easy access to storage usage data for SharePoint Online sites through the Graph. However, the data is available through the SharePoint Online management module (here’s an example script) or by checking the storage data reported in the SharePoint admin center.
The same problem doesn’t affect Graph usage data for Exchange Online or OneDrive for Business, so you could use that approach or cmdlets from the Exchange Online and SharePoint Online management modules. Here are examples of scripts to report Exchange mailbox sizes and OneDrive for Business account sizes.
Microsoft warns that “Mailboxes are the size of the user’s mailbox plus their online archives plus deleted items held for Backup.” The Exchange mailbox size calculation is therefore the size of user-accessible folders in the primary and archive mailboxes (if enabled) plus the size of the Recoverable Items folders in the primary and archive mailboxes.
Computing Microsoft 365 Backup Costs
In my tenant, the outcome for the locations selected for backup protection was:
- SharePoint Online 109 GB * $0.15 = $16.35
- OneDrive for Business 71 GB = $10.65
- Exchange Online: 20 GB = $3
Overall, the estimated Microsoft 365 backup costs for my tenant came to $30. Growth is expected to accommodate new information added to the target locations, so the actual cost over a year might go from $30 to $36 (20% growth).
Your mileage will vary depending on the growth experienced in the selected locations and how aggressive the tenant is in clearing out older data using retention policies. Archive mailboxes grow by holding information moved from the primary mailbox by Exchange mailbox retention policies. Archived data tends to remain for longer periods. For this reason, it’s not unusual to see archive mailboxes that are several times larger than primary mailboxes (up to the 1 TB limit for expandable archives).
In the first month, Microsoft 365 backup cost EUR 12.88 or $14.03 (Figure 1), or about half the expected cost. I assume that some startup processing takes place in the background that resulted in the lower outcome.
The invoice for the second month increased backup costs to EUR 25.18 or $27.42 (Figure 2), so it’s tracking closer to the expected level. Microsoft 365 Backup is processing more data. However, the extra data does not reflect a doubling of costs over the previous period. Overall, this points to some stabilization in the calculation of backup costs. I imagine that when Microsoft 365 Backup is generally available, the costs incurred for Azure subscriptions will be at the predicted levels very soon after commencement.
Driving Toward General Availability
Microsoft 365 Backup is certainly worth considering for tenant data protection. The big issue that traditional backup products point to is that the data remains in Microsoft datacenters and therefore breaks the classic backup principle of keeping a copy of the data in a separate location. While true, the counterargument is that given the petabytes of data created in Microsoft 365 tenants daily, it’s hard to move such a volume of data offsite to a remote backup and even harder to restore data in an acceptable time. Microsoft’s datacenters have a robust record of availability, and I don’t see a problem with the backup data being kept alongside the live data. After all, if the Microsoft 365 datacenters are unavailable, what is the restore target for the offsite copies of sites and mailboxes?
A compromise might be to combine traditional and Microsoft 365 Backup into a hybrid where the traditional backup satisfies the need to move data to a remote location while Microsoft 365 backup satisfies the requirement for fast restore. Given that several backup vendors are building support for the Microsoft backup API into their products, I imagine that we will see some interesting innovation in this space.
In the meantime, we await the general availability of Microsoft 365 Backup. In that version, I anticipate that Microsoft will address the problem with restoring sites under compliance holds. I hope that they add properties to show when sites and mailboxes are protected by Microsoft 365 Backup that’s available through PowerShell and a Graph API. Properties like last backup time, the technology used for backup (including ISV products), and the size of protected data would be nice. In fact, a Graph API for setting up and managing backups and restores would be even nicer.
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IMHO, the big problem with Microsoft’s new offering is quite simply the cost. Due to the volume of data I store in SharePoint and user mailboxes, my quick math worked out to something north of $300 per month, which is quite insane (and I didn’t even consider archives or deleted items).
As I see it, this offering, since it’s priced by the GB rather than per user, is only competitive for exceedingly small companies and tenants. Perhaps that’s the point, as I’m sure Microsoft is taking pains (for now at least) not to cannibalize sales from partners such as Veeam, et al.
Think of it this way: you now have the opportunity to discuss pricing with all the backup vendors in the knowledge of what Microsoft 365 backkup will cost. The other vendors might or might not reduce their proces to win business, and if you choose one that uses Microsoft’s backup APIs, you might get the speed advantage that Microsoft has (because the data is all in its datacenters) with a nicer GUI and better features.