Disaster recovery of a CubeBackup for Microsoft 365 instance.

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A server crash can be an unpredictable disaster that can happen at any time. In some unfortunate cases, your CubeBackup installation may be completely unrecoverable. For example:

• Your CubeBackup instance is running on a local server and backing up to a NAS or your company's data center, but the disk on your local server becomes corrupted and all data is lost.
• You deploy CubeBackup on a cloud VM and back up to private cloud storage. The cloud VM is accidentally deleted or terminated.

In both of these cases, it should still be possible to connect a new CubeBackup installation to your old backups, as long as you have a copy of the encryption key file. Otherwise, you have to start the backups again from the very beginning.

Step-by-step instructions

1. Install CubeBackup on a new machine, or in a different directory on the original machine.

2. Before going through the configuration wizard, copy the encryption key file to <installation directory>/data/keys.json.

   Tips:
   (1)If you did not choose to encrypt your backup data in your previous instance, this step is unnecessary.
   (2)For Linux users, please change the ownership of the encryption key file to cbuser.

   sudo chown cbuser:cbuser /opt/cubebackup365/data/keys.json

3. In Step 2, choose the same Storage type and enter the storage location of your previous backup data.

   Tips:
   (1) If the backup data is stored in cloud storage, you can simply enter the same bucket or container name. If you are using local storage, please ensure that the backup folder location points to your original backup folder (e.g.\\192.168.8.22\backups\cubebackup_data).
   (2) CubeBackup will regenerate a new data index based on your original backup data.
   (3) Make sure that if you originally encrypted your backups that the Encrypt backups box is checked! If your backups were not encrypted, this box must be unchecked.
   

4. In Step 3, you are required to register and authorize a new application in Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) on behalf of CubeBackup to access resources in your organization. Please follow the step-by-step instructions below:
   

   • CubeBackup will request an authentication code from Microsoft Azure. Copy the code displayed in the CubeBackup configuration wizard, and click the authentication portal link.
   • On the Sign in to your account webpage, paste the code and sign in to Microsoft Azure as a Global Administrator in your organization, and then follow the prompt to grant the necessary permissions for CubeBackup.
   • Return to the CubeBackup configuration wizard and wait a few moments while CubeBackup verifies the server readiness of your application.

     If an error message pops up, please wait a few minutes and try again. In some cases, the application registration and authentication need time to propagate through Microsoft's servers.

5. Based on your previous backup data and configuration, CubeBackup should have automatically selected the original users and SharePoint sites into the backup list for you in Step 4 and Step 5. You can look through the list and click Next if you are satisfied.

6. In Step 6, you will need to assign a new CubeBackup administrator.

7. After logging in to CubeBackup, all backup data and operation histories should be displayed in the web console exactly as before. You may wish to restore a test file to confirm that everything is functioning properly.

Please note that if you cannot access the original encryption key, or if the backup storage directory is unavailable, you will have to begin the backup from scratch.

If you need any further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us at [email protected].