SkyKick - Restoring Office 365 SharePoint Data

Note:
The information contained in this article has been provided by Cloud Direct's partner, SkyKick.

SkyKick Cloud Backup, provided by Cloud Direct, backs up, and can restore:

  • SharePoint Site Collections
  • SharePoint subsites
  • SharePoint folders
  • The following SharePoint lists:
    • Generic List
    • Document Library
    • Events (Calendar List)
    • Picture Library
    • Tasks
    • Announcements
    • Contacts
    • Links

SharePoint Site Collections in Cloud Backup are displayed in Folder View for easy browsing, and you can perform all your search actions, including Smart Search options, from a single screen.

This article shows how to restore Office 365 SharePoint data, when it has been previously backed up by SkyKick Cloud Backup. The process has essentially two steps; search for the data to restore, and then restore it. These are explained in this article.

  • Search for the data to restore
    • Folder View of Account
    • Search to find
    • Browse to find
  • Restore
    • Individual Item Restore
    • Bulk Restore
    • Previous Version Restore
    • Time taken for the Restore process

 

Search for the data to restore

To restore lost data in SharePoint, navigate to the subscription, and click the SharePoint tab to reveal a list of SharePoint Site Collections. If it is a large subscription, containing many Site Collections, then use the Search field to find the Site Collection you want to search. Once you find the required Site Collection, click it to open in Folder View.

If you want to restore the full Site Collection, see KB0012383, SkyKick - SharePoint Full Site Collection Restore.

Folder View of Account

On the Folder View of the account, you can either enter text in the Search field, or browse through the folder Name column to find what you want to restore.

Search to find

To ensure privacy, Cloud Backup does not index the content of files or lists.

In Cloud Backup for SharePoint, you can search for files by File name, and then sort the results by:

  • File name
  • File type
  • Location
  • Modified date
  • Modified by

You can search for subsites and lists as follows:

  • Subsites by name
  • The following lists by name or location, and items within each of list by Name, Location, Created by, and Last modified by:
    • Document Library
    • Picture Library
    • Tasks
    • Announcements
    • Contacts
    • Links
  • The following list types have exceptions.
    • Events (Calendar List) can only be restored as a full calendar. Individual items cannot be searched or restored.
    • Generic List items can be searched by the Title field and location.

Smart Search

Cloud Backup supports a variety of Smart Search queries. To narrow your search to subsites or a specific list type, you can enter the following Smart Search terms.

  • subsite:[subsite name] (e.g. subsite:marketing)
  • folder:[folder name]
  • file:[file name]
  • announcement:[announcement name]
  • contact:[contact last name]

Advanced Search

Cloud Backup also supports a variety of Advanced Search capabilities, including Elasticsearch, Wildcards, and RegEx. (Note, for a RegEx search, enter "RegEx:" before the query). For more information, see KB0012379, SkyKick - Advanced Search.

If multiple items appear in your search, you can sort the items by Date modified, File type, and Size.

Browse to find

Click any data type to browse its contents. Within each you can sort the items by Date modified, File type, and Size. To sort, just click the column heading.

As you drill into folders, your path is tracked at the top of the screen. If you want to navigate back, simply click on the path to open a menu, and select the folder you want to return to.

 

Restore

Individual Item Restore

To restore individual folders or items, tick the appropriate checkbox to select the folder or item, then click Restore.

Note:
You can restore multiple items, including different item types (e.g. subsites, lists, folders, and files) with a single click.

Every SharePoint restoration is a "new item" restore because Cloud Backup does not overwrite existing items. This means that if the item being restored already exists, Cloud Backup will add the restored item back to the site collection with its name appended with a number in parentheses. On the other hand, if the item does no longer exists, Cloud Backup will add the item without appending the name of the file.

Bulk Restore

If you want to restore the full Site Collection, see KB0012383, SkyKick - SharePoint Full Site Collection Restore.

Cloud Backup also supports the restoration of an entire SharePoint Subsite or List.

When a bulk restore is done with Cloud Backup, it is merged with existing content. In other words, the data is de-duplicated before it is inserted into the account. Cloud Backup does not overwrite or delete data at any time.

Restoring a subsite will restore all the missing items below the subsite. A merge restore will restore the items with the latest version of each file. To restore previous versions, follow the steps below.

Previous Version Restore

By default, Cloud Backup will restore the most recent version of a file. However, if versioning is enabled you can restore previous versions. To do so, proceed as follows.

  1. In the Actions column, click the ellipsis (...).
  2. From the menu options that appear, click Version History.

A window opens in which you can select the version you want to restore.

  1. Tick the desired checkbox(es), then click Restore.

Time taken for the Restore process

While the restore is initiated with a single click and Cloud Backup makes every effort to restore the content as quickly as possible, the time required to complete the restoration is based on a variety of external factors, including:

  • The overall size of the data set being restored.
  • Microsoft Office 365 throttling.
  • Microsoft Azure throttling.
  • The overall availability of Office 365.

During this time, you can view the status of the restore by hovering over the progress indicator next to the mailbox being restored.