AvePoint Cloud Backup for Microsoft 365

What it is

A backup and recovery product for Microsoft 365 data, made by AvePoint. This page compares it against the backup Microsoft now ships itself, because that is the comparison that decides whether a third party product is needed.

First, the thing most comparisons omit

Microsoft 365 Backup is not included in a Microsoft 365 licence. Microsoft describes it as a pay as you go offering charged on consumption rather than on user licences, billed against a linked Azure subscription, and set up by a SharePoint Administrator or Global Administrator with owner or contributor rights on that subscription.

So this is not free against paid. It is one metered service against another, and the honest comparison is coverage and terms, not price against zero.

What Microsoft's own service does

• Workloads: OneDrive, SharePoint and Exchange Online.
• Retention period: one year for all three.
• Restore points: for OneDrive and SharePoint, ten minute restore points for the previous two weeks, roughly daily express restore points, and weekly express restore points from two to fifty two weeks; for Exchange Online, ten minutes across the previous fifty two weeks. Microsoft is explicit that the ten minutes is a recovery point objective rather than a snapshot taken every ten minutes, and that all deletions are backed up regardless of frequency.
• Granularity: a OneDrive account, a SharePoint site or an Exchange user account, with granular file and folder restore generally available for SharePoint and OneDrive.

And the limits, checked on 2026-08-05, which is worth dating because Microsoft's wording is provisional in places.

• Hybrid mailboxes, stated per mailbox rather than per tenant: "Hybrid deployments are not supported. Only mailboxes fully hosted in Exchange Online can be protected." A hybrid organisation can still protect the mailboxes that are fully in Exchange Online.
• Other recipient types: shared and user mailboxes can be selected, and "other Exchange recipient types, such as room and group mailboxes, are not supported at this time". Both the "such as" and the "at this time" are Microsoft's, so the exclusion is broader than the two named types and is expected to change.
• Mailbox items can only be restored to the current mailbox and cannot be restored to another mailbox, which rules out recovering a departed person's mail into a manager's box.
• Items moved to the Deleted Items folder are not restored, and mailbox draft items are neither backed up nor restorable.

Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups are worth stating carefully: their files live in SharePoint sites, which Microsoft 365 Backup can protect. What it does not protect is Teams chat, the Group mailbox and Teams metadata.

What AvePoint documents

AvePoint's documentation portal lists Cloud Backup as protecting Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Groups, Teams, Microsoft Teams Chat, Project Online, Public Folders, Viva Engage, Power BI, Power Automate and Power Apps. AvePoint's product page names a slightly different set, adding Planner, so confirm exact workload scope against the order form rather than either marketing page.

AvePoint's product page also states that backups run up to four times a day. That figure belongs on this page precisely because it runs against the sale. Note what it is and is not: an upper bound on scheduled backup runs, which is not the same kind of measurement as Microsoft's recovery point objective, so the two are not directly comparable and this page does not rule between them. Ask the vendor for a recovery point objective if that is the deciding factor.

What this page cannot tell you

Two questions buyers ask that no first party AvePoint source answers, so we do not answer them either.

• Retention length. AvePoint's documentation and product page do not state a retention period for this product. Retention appears to be set by subscription terms, so if a regulatory obligation runs beyond one year, get the figure in writing before relying on it.
• Hybrid and room mailboxes. AvePoint's published workload list names cloud services only. It does not address on premises mailboxes in a hybrid organisation, or room and resource mailboxes. A tenant with either should confirm scope with the vendor rather than infer it from Microsoft's gap.

Where the statements here come from

Everything about Microsoft 365 Backup comes from Microsoft's documentation. Everything about the AvePoint product comes from AvePoint's own documentation portal and product page. We have not tested either product, and vendor claims that the vendor's own documentation does not support are not repeated.

The question to answer before ordering

Not "is backup a good idea". Narrower ones.

• Does anything outside OneDrive, SharePoint and Exchange Online need protecting, Teams chat above all?
• Does the recovery point objective need to be finer than daily?
• Does recovery ever need to land somewhere other than the original mailbox?
• What retention is written into the subscription terms, in writing?

Write the answers down before the renewal, because that list is also the record of why the spend was justified.