Back up Microsoft Teams

This chapter covers the following topics:

Prerequisites

To back up Microsoft Teams channels, posts, and files, make sure your users are active and have a commercial or trial Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace license. A separate SharePoint/Teams/SharedDrives license is required for every domain where you are planning to backup Microsoft Teams along with SharePoint.

To learn more about licensing, refer to the Licensing chapter

Getting Started with Teams Backup

To enable Microsoft Teams backup, click Configure Backup on the dashboard, then turn on Teams backup services. Select Apply to enabled users to create Microsoft Teams backup for all enabled users.

To create the initial backup, click Save. The backup task will be created and scheduled automatically. You can monitor the backup task processing using Task Manager.

Once the initial backup is completed, you can view a list of backed up items.

During every backup run the latest file version is backed up. There is no possibility to backup all file versions at one run

Browsing the Teams Backups

The Microsoft Teams backup structure looks as follows:

Each team contains a list of channels
Each team channel contains its posts and files.
To view a list of posts of a particular channel, click Posts

To view a list of files of a particular channel, click Files.

Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace backup currently supports Microsoft Teams channels, posts, and files backup.

Note that Microsoft Teams files are kept in SharePoint. To back up Microsoft Teams files of a Team, first enable the SharePoint backup

Back up Teams

To initiate a backup, select Teams in the horizontal menu bar. By default, Teams backup is performed twice per day automatically. To start the backup for the selected user, click Run Backup. You will be notified about the backup job creating event.

You can monitor the backup task processing using the Task Manager.

Restore Teams

Refer to the Prerequisites for Restore Operations chapter to avoid any issues.

Restore as a New Team

You can restore any Team as a new Team, containing posts from all selected channels. To restore specific Team as a new one, including selected channels, perform the following:

On the Teams tab expand the root folder in the left panel.
Select the required Team. You can find a necessary file or folder by filename or part of the filename. Type the search expression in the search box above the grid and click the search icon.
On the middle panel, select all the channels or the required channels only.

Click Restore as a new Team.

Select the restore point: the latest version or a point in time.
Click Restore.

New Team will be named as follows: %original Team name%restored%restore date%.

By default, any Team will have a General channel. If the original General channel was not selected for restore, the General channel appears in the restored Team, but this channel will contain no content.

Files attached to posts cannot be restored along with channels and posts. To restore such files refer to the Restore Teams Files section. Consider, files restored using SharePoint resources remain detached from the posts these files were originally attached to and can be used for information purposes only.

All restored Teams will be included to backup along with original Teams. It is recommended to delete the restored Team in Microsoft Teams when it is no longer needed to improve backup performance and save the storage space.

Restore Teams Files

Microsoft Teams files are stored in SharePoint, so they can be restored using the SharePoint Restore.

Restored files will not appears in the posts to which these files were attached

Microsoft Teams files can be downloaded on the local machine or restored from the SharePoint backup.

You have the following restore options:

Restore to original location with Restore. You can select to restore the latest version or specific point in time.
Restore to Restore folder of this account on SharePoint with Restore to 'Restore' folder. You can select to restore the latest version or specific point in time. Restored files appear in the Restore folder on SharePoint.

Download a file revision using a download icon next to the file revision.

To download a file, browse the backup content, then click the particular file in the middle panel to view its revision list. Revisions appear to the right. Click the required file revision to download it to the Downloads folder.

Delete Files from Teams Backup

Microsoft Teams files are stored in SharePoint, so they can be deleted using the SharePoint Delete feature.