1. CubeBackup Documents
  2. CubeBackup for Microsoft 365 Documents
  3. FAQ
  4. Free Teams and SharePoint backups: Features and limitations

Free Teams and SharePoint backups: Features and limitations

Backups for all Teams and SharePoint sites in your Microsoft 365 organization are free of charge in CubeBackup and automatically included in your CubeBackup license. You can back up as many Teams and SharePoint sites as you need within your organization without extra cost.

For example, if there are 60 users, 100 Teams and 100 SharePoint sites in your organization, a 60-user license will be sufficient.

Limitations for Teams backups

Currently, CubeBackup for Microsoft 365 backs up only Teams channel posts, and does not support personal chats in Teams. All shared documents in Teams-connected SharePoint sites are protected through SharePoint backups. 

Limitations for SharePoint backups

  1. Currently, CubeBackup for Microsoft 365 only backs up SharePoint document libraries and lists in a SharePoint site. OneNote, embedded web apps and site pages are not recoverable via CubeBackup.

  2. Backup performance may be limited for large SharePoint sites containing more than 500GB of data or extremely large lists. This is because Microsoft Graph API strictly limits frequent requests for SharePoint data. CubeBackup mitigates these throttling by retrying requests in accordance with Microsoft's suggestions. However, throttling may persist for a large site, causing its significantly slow backup to take several weeks.

Recommendations

To address this issue, consider performing the initial full backups of specific large SharePoint sites on a separate VM or server. Distributing the backup workload across multiple servers and Entra ID applications can reduce the frequency of API requests and help avoid bottlenecks caused by Microsoft Graph API limitations.

Please allow the initial full backup to finish and avoid unnecessary interruptions. Although CubeBackup automatically resume from where it left off, canceling a backup can still require additional time and operation cost while CubeBackup locates the lastest checkpoint and cleans up residual data. As long as the backup speed is updating in real time, the backup is still progressing. Subsequent backups will be incremental and much faster.