Safeguarding your Microsoft 365 and Entra ID data is more than just good practice—it's a critical strategy for the success of your business. Syncro's Cloud Backup feature doesn't just work alongside Microsoft's data security approach; it’s the essential tool that helps you save valuable time and generate more revenue.

Our dedicated backup solution goes beyond the basic protections Microsoft's native tools offer. It ensures your most important data is preserved, providing the resilience, compliance, and quick recovery capabilities that help minimize costly downtime and avoid potential revenue loss from data breaches or outages. 

Protect your critical Microsoft 365 (including Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams) and Entra ID data from common threats like accidental deletions, malicious insider actions, ransomware attacks, and system misconfigurations. This proactive defense significantly reduces the time your team would otherwise spend on complex, frustrating, and often futile data recovery efforts. With Syncro's Cloud Backup feature you can:

• Easily back up entire Tenants or specific end-users by group membership, 
• Quickly find and recover data, thereby drastically cutting support time, and
• Directly bill your clients for this essential, high-profit service right from our platform, turning data protection into a new revenue stream. 

Start now with a free trial.

Start Your Trial

Notes: 

• You must have a paid Syncro account to start a trial of Microsoft 365 and Entra ID backup.
• Trials should be initiated by a Technical Lead who has Global Administrator security permissions.
• Once Microsoft 365 and Entra ID backup reach General Availability (GA), your backup trial will last for 14 days, allowing you to explore backup configuration, monitoring, and restore functionality risk-free for any number of tenants.
• To preserve all your settings and backed up data, we recommend subscribing before your trial ends.

To start your trial, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Admin > Integrations - App Center.
2. Select the Syncro Cloud Backup app card. (You'll find Cloud Backup under the “Backup” category.)
3. Click Start Trial to initiate your trial, and again to acknowledge the confirmation message. 

You'll be directed to Onboard a New Backup Customer. 

Onboard a New Backup Customer

To enable backups for a Syncro Tenant, watch this short video and/or follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the Organizations tab/module.
2. Click the hyperlinked name of a Syncro Tenant to display its Details Page.
3. In the Cloud Backup section, click Enable:
   
4. In the "Set Data Storage Location" pop-up window, select the Storage Region that best aligns with your compliance or data residency requirements, then click Continue. 
   IMPORTANT: The Storage Region can NOT be modified after this initial configuration (once consent is granted in the next step). This is the location of the Microsoft Azure data center where your backup will be stored, currently in the United States (the default; East Coast), Canada, United Kingdom, or Australia.
5. If you're not already, you may be prompted to log into Microsoft. When asked to accept Microsoft's request for permissions to read and write data to enable backups and restores, click Accept. 
6. In the "Configure Back Up For" pop-up window, :
   
   1. Select which users to back up. You can choose “All Microsoft Users” or “Entra ID User Groups.” If you select the latter, a dropdown menu appears where you can check to select the specific groups. When selecting Entra ID User Groups, you must choose at least one user group and at least one service to back up:
       
      Note: You should select “All Microsoft Users” unless there’s a strong business or technical reason not to. This ensures full protection across workloads like SharePoint, Teams, and Entra ID, which depend on broad user coverage. This also simplifies onboarding since all new users are automatically included in the backup. However, you might choose specific Enter ID groups when, for example:
      • You're only backing up VIPs, C-levels or sensitive departments like Finance or Legal.
      • You have large tenants with thousands of users; selecting critical groups reduces backup costs.
      • You're doing a trial or phased rollout and prefer to start with a test group.
   2. Select the user and/or Organization-level data to back up. By default, all boxes are checked. Be sure to check one or more boxes for the Microsoft 365 User and Organization Data you want to back up. 
      IMPORTANT: You must select at least 80% of the users in a tenant to adhere to the Fair Use Policy; this ensures consistent and complete coverage of shared content and collaboration data. 
   3. By default, the “Add new user automatically” box is checked and new tenant users will be added to the backup. We recommend this because it provides higher automatic backup protection, but you may uncheck the box to prioritize billing predictability (since your cost will be based on the number of users backed up). If you selected specific Entra ID User Groups, only new users in the selected groups are automatically added.
7. Click Review Terms.
8. Review the user count and percentage in the confirmation pop-up window to ensure it looks correct, then click Save. 

Backup for your Syncro Tenant is now enabled. The Cloud Backup section displays rows for each Service:

An initial backup is immediately started; each Service you selected to back up will show “In Progress” in the Last Backup column until the backup has completed. From this point forward, backups will automatically occur twice daily. (The specific time may vary to spread load.) 

Tip: Any Services you chose not to enable backup for are also displayed, but are grayed out. You can always access your backup settings for a Syncro Tenant in its Cloud Backup section using the Manage > Backup Settings option. 

Next, see how easy it is to Bill Your Customers for Backup Services. 

Bill Your Customers for Backup Services

When you're subscribed to Microsoft 365 and Entra ID backup in Syncro, you will be charged per user per month, based on the monthly peak number of Microsoft users backed up. However, whenever you onboard a new backup customer, Universal Billing is automatically enabled. 

After a quick configuration, you'll easily be able to charge your customers for Microsoft 365 and Entra ID backups directly from Syncro. 

Simply follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Admin > Integrations - Customer Mapping, then select "Syncro Cloud Backup" from the Vendor dropdown menu.
2. Ensure that each Vendor Customer (Syncro Tenant) in the left column is mapped to the correct Syncro Customer in the right column:
   
3.  Navigate to the Invoices tab, then from the Invoices Module menu, select Recurring Invoices.
4. Edit the scheduled invoice for your customer to add a Vendor Usage Counter for Syncro Cloud Backup:
   

That's it! You've fully automated billing the Customer Organization for active users in its Tenant.

Now, see how you'll Monitor the Health of Your Backup.

Monitor the Health of Your Backup

Syncro's Microsoft 365 and Entra ID backup solution provides visibility into all your backup operations.

First, you'll always be able to see and validate the latest backup for each Syncro Tenant in its Cloud Backup section:

This table shows a row for each Service that's been backed up, and includes a date/timestamp of the Last Backup, the Last Backup Size, (number of) Users, and (number of) Items (i.e., the discrete items of recoverable data such as emails within Mail, files within OneDrive, etc.). Additionally, a Restore button is available for each backed-up Service.

You can get more detailed insights via the Task Manager and by viewing the Audit Log. Both of these options are available from the Manage menu: 

Finally--and most importantly--let's look at an example of how to Search For & Restore Data. 

Search For & Restore Data

Whether through malicious behavior or accidental negligence, data loss happens all the time. Unfortunately, this can go unnoticed until it's too late. Microsoft's shared responsibility model means that while their data retention policies can work for compliance, you are responsible for having a separate, independent copy of your data for backup purposes. Additionally, native tools often have short retention windows and lack the ability for easy, point-in-time restores. This makes it difficult to recover data that goes unnoticed for weeks or months.

Let's imagine for a moment that a folder in a boss's mailbox had been accidentally deleted 2 months ago; now you have to recover his mail. Here's how you'd do that:

1. Navigate to the Syncro Tenant's Details Page. 
2. In the Cloud Backups section, locate the row for “Mail” in the Service column, then click Restore:
   
   The Backup Portal displays the Mail page.
3. Use the dropdown menu in the upper left corner to select the boss's name/email address. You'll see the names of all his folders and emails:
   
4. Click Restore, and select the “Restore All Mailbox To . . .” option.
5. Verify the options in the Restore Options pop-up window are correct, then click Restore.

Now that you've learned more about Microsoft 365 and Entra ID backup from Syncro, check out all the things you can back up and restore.