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With billions of files added to Microsoft 365 every day, organizations need effective ways to manage growing content, recover quickly from disruptions, and keep storage costs in check. Since becoming generally available, Microsoft 365 Backup and Microsoft 365 Archive have helped businesses do just that. Together, these products provide fast, reliable recovery, and low-cost, long-term storage for SharePoint content, all within the Microsoft 365 trust boundary. 

We’re excited to share some new features that will make these solutions simpler than ever to adopt and more flexible to use. 

Microsoft 365 Backup: Fast, flexible recovery—now even easier to manage 

Microsoft 365 Backup helps organizations recover data quickly and confidently after disruptions like accidental deletions, ransomware, or overwrite events. It offers scalable backup and restore capabilities across SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange Online. Built natively into Microsoft 365, Backup is designed for speed, security, and simplicity; it’s designed to handle large data volume recoveries efficiently and quickly in cases where export-based solutions tend to struggle. With recovery points as frequent as every 10 minutes and bulk recovery speeds of up to 2TB per hour,* Backup helps reduce downtime and keep business operations running smoothly. 

Over the past year, Backup has become a trusted solution for restoring data at scale. Now, we’re expanding its capabilities with new tools that make it easier to manage backups. 

We’ve recently introduced support for dynamic policies that automatically reflect changes in distribution lists or security group membership. You will soon also be able to turn on full workload dynamic policies to automatically back up all Exchange and/or OneDrive users and/or SharePoint sites in your tenant—without needing to maintain specific group membership. 

Additional new features coming within the next few months include granular browse and file restore for OneDrive and SharePoint, and the ability to create multiple backup policies – which will in the future support departmental billing and more policy specific options. We’re also introducing multi-admin change notifications, which let you assign a set of administrators to receive email alerts when potentially damaging changes are made to your backup settings or recovery actions are taken. And with protection unit-level offboarding, you’ll soon be able to permanently delete specific protection units—such as OneDrive accounts, SharePoint sites, or Exchange Online mailboxes—from your backups after an appropriate grace period. 

Microsoft 365 Backup is a great way to help you adhere to the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) compliance regulation by providing fast, built-in data recovery that helps meet availability and resilience requirements for regulated industries. 

For government organizations, we’re excited to announce that Backup features will be available in the Microsoft 365 Government environment in the coming months. 

Customer Story: How Microsoft 365 Backup helps If P&C Insurance protect business critical data 

Organizations across industries already use Microsoft 365 Backup to strengthen data protection and simplify recovery. One example is If P&C Insurance, a leading Nordic and Baltic insurance company, which adopted Backup to improve operational resilience without adding complexity. With more than 8,000 employees already using Microsoft 365, the company was able to quickly strengthen its data protection strategy, eliminate vendor complexity, and improve recovery speed—all while staying within the Microsoft trust boundary. Read the full customer story.  

“We have quite restricted processes when it comes to allowing third-party vendors to store our data, but the Microsoft trust boundary gave us confidence that we were still operating within our own guardrails. Microsoft 365 Backup isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it service—we see it as something that will continue to develop, and we’re glad to help shape what comes next. Even if someone accidentally deletes everything in their OneDrive, we can easily get it back. That makes a real difference when it comes to productivity.” 

Patrik Carlstedt, Collaboration Platform Responsible, If P&C Insurance   

Recognized partner solutions 

We know that the native Microsoft 365 Backup solution may not meet every enterprise need, so we encourage you to explore recognized Microsoft 365 Backup Storage solutions built on top of the Microsoft 365 Backup Storage platform.  All new and upcoming capabilities are available to recognized Microsoft partners using Backup Storage, so third-party solutions can continue to offer the same speed and scalability benefits alongside their differentiated features.   

Microsoft 365 Archive: Low-cost, long-term storage built for Copilot readiness  

Microsoft 365 Archive supports easier adoption of Copilot by giving organizations a simple way to move less relevant, inactive content out of the Copilot index—at no additional cost. And, if you are currently or will soon pay for extra SharePoint storage space, it helps reduce storage costs by up to 75% by moving that inactive SharePoint content to a cold storage tier, without compromising searchability, security, or compliance. Because it’s built directly into SharePoint, Archive lets you manage long-term content using familiar tools. Metadata, permissions, and retention policies stay seamlessly intact, and archived content remains discoverable by admins and easily reactivated when needed. Microsoft 365 Archive benefits from the same compliance certifications as SharePoint, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and other key industry standards. 

Since launch, Archive has helped organizations streamline storage and manage growing content more efficiently. Now, we’re making it even easier to adopt and operate with updates that remove cost barriers, improve visibility, and give both IT admins and end users more control over how archived content is accessed and restored. 

We recently removed the reactivation fee for SharePoint content in Microsoft 365 Archive, giving organizations more flexibility to move data in and out of the archive tier without worrying about unexpected costs. This change was made in response to customer feedback—many were hesitant to archive data out of concern they might later need to access it and face a penalty. By removing the fee, billing is now more predictable, based purely on how much content is archived. In lieu of the reactivation fee, we’ve added a four-month restriction that temporarily blocks re-archiving of recently restored content. In the future, customers will have the option to override that restriction by paying a fee to immediately re–archive the content. This optionality gives you the broadest and lowest-cost range of archival and reactivation options to fit your business needs. 

Additional updates are rolling out to expand how Archive can support your organization. New Graph APIs, now in beta, allow developers and ISVs to build custom solutions and workflows that interact directly with archive operations. A new end user search experience will allow users to find and retrieve archived content more easily, based on a toggle to include or filter archived content, without needing admin involvement. 

Together, these updates to Archive make it easy to optimize SharePoint storage and get more out of Copilot. 

Stay in control as your content grows 

With these latest updates, Microsoft 365 Backup and Microsoft 365 Archive give organizations more ways to protect, manage, and optimize their data at scale. From faster, more flexible recovery options to smarter archiving and cost-saving controls, these tools are designed to adapt to how your business works. 

Stay tuned for more updates and enhancements as we continue to improve our solutions to better meet your needs.  

Attend our Microsoft 365 Community Conference session: Manage Data Effectively with Microsoft 365 Backup, Microsoft 365 Backup Storage, and Microsoft 365 Archive on May 8 at 2:30pm in room 2.  

You can also: 

• Learn more about Microsoft 365 Backup and Microsoft 365 Archive 


• View our latest Mechanics video  


• View the Microsoft 365 Backup and Microsoft 365 Archive infographic  


• Read the Microsoft 365 Backup best practices whitepaper 


• Find a recognized Microsoft 365 Backup Storage solution 

*Based on internal benchmarking of a 1,000 SharePoint site restore, where those sites have an average of 12GB of content storage; this is a representation of expected average performance, not a guarantee.