OneDrive for Business

OneDrive for Business is a SaaS application that is bundled in your Microsoft 365 subscription service. It is an intelligent files app for Microsoft 365 connecting you to all your files so you can share and work together from anywhere while protecting your work. It enables you to easily store, access, and discover your individual and shared work files in Microsoft 365. Using the policy-based data protection solution from Cohesity Cloud Protection Service, you can protect OneDrive for Business data on Microsoft 365.

This topic covers the following:

Considerations

Review and understand the following considerations before you protect your Microsoft 365 OneDrive data:

  • From the recovery workflow, you cannot download an empty folder.

  • Restoring shared permissions for files in the Preservation Hold Library (PHL) drive is not supported.

    This is a Private Preview feature. Contact your Cohesity account team to enable the feature.

  • PHL data can only be recovered using full OneDrive recovery. Granular level recovery is not supported for the PHL data.

  • Data from PHL is not searchable.

  • OneDrive protection is supported only for users present on Azure AD or Hybrid setup with users present on Azure AD and not for users on the on-premises Active Directory.

  • File/folder permissions with no role will not be recovered since Microsoft does not allow adding such permissions via Graph APIs. For example, no role will be assigned when a Restricted View permission is added to a user from Advanced Setting.

  • Microsoft 365 Backup Storage service is supported for OneDrive.

    This is a Private Preview feature. Contact your Cohesity account team to enable the feature.

  • OneDrive does not support item permissions from applications and devices.

  • During the recovery process:

    • The original sharing link is not restored. Instead, a new sharing link with similar settings is created.

    • Passwords associated with sharing links, if set, are not restored.

  • Backup and recovery of OneNote files in OneDrive.

    • For new Microsoft 365 tenants (created after November 1, 2024), certificate-based authentication must be enabled.

    • For existing tenants (created before November 1, 2024), backup applications must be updated to use modern authentication and must be granted SharePoint admin permissions.

    • The first OneNote backup after enabling this feature may take longer than usual incremental backups, as it will include all OneNote files that were previously skipped.

    • This is a Controlled Availability feature. Contact your Cohesity account team to enable the feature.

  • Microsoft 365 items with only special characters will not be listed in granular search. The item name must contain at least one alphanumeric character to be listed in the search result.

  • The exact sharing link is not recovered; instead, a new sharing link with the similar settings are added.

  • Passwords, if set, are not recovered for sharing links.

  • The Can't download permission recovery is not supported.

  • When recovering to an alternate separate entity, the root permissions of the OneDrive are automatically inherited.

  • For granular recovery of an item, only the permissions for the required item is set, and not its parents.

  • The progress bar may show 100% even when the recovery of permissions is not complete yet.

  • Permissions for all files and folders are recovered at the first level.

  • Items with failure in permissions backup are not indexed (and will not be displayed in the search result).

  • Permissions are not recovered during alternate domain recovery.

  • The current run backs up only the current file versions.

  • Recovery always creates a new version. The actual creation time and owner details of the file are not recovered. The current time is displayed as the creation/modification time and the SharePoint app is displayed as the owner/modifier.

  • Overriding auto-protection is not supported.

  • The OneDrive backup size displayed in the UI represents the total used quota of OneDrive, which includes all versions of files. However, during recovery, only the single version of each file stored in the snapshot is restored. As a result, the recovered OneDrive size may differ from the backed-up size.

  • The following metadata fields are restored when OneDrive data is restored:

    • Created By (author)

    • Modified By (editor)

    • Created Date

    • Modified Date

      During cross-domain restore operations, the Created By (author) and Modified By (editor) fields are not restored because the corresponding users from the source domain will be unavailable in the target domain.
      The Created By metadata is not restored if the user referenced in the Created By field is deleted. The Modified By and Created By metadata are not restored if the user referenced in the Modified By field is deleted.

  • Backup and recovery of files with sensitivity labels is supported.

    For files with sensitivity labels,

    • Only a user with access via the label can open the file after downloading, provided the label is not permanently deleted in SharePoint.

    • When recovering to original location, if the file is already present in the destination, the recovery fails. If the file is not present in the destination, a new file will be created.

    • The files downloaded from SharePoint as encrypted. You can download the same file from the backup storage.