I’m starting a new arrangement with a local charity in the coming days, they’ve asked me to take over their ad-hoc IT needs due to various issues with their previous provider.
One of the tasks they’ve had left over is to get an offline backup sorted out for their Office 365 instance. My understanding is that they used to host Exchange and Sharepoint on-prem, with the physical server still being present but turned off (I’m getting more details on what’s actually there as I think it could be very useful for some future projects). They’ve now moved wholly to 0365 (I don’t know if that’s true for the logins to the systems themselves, I have a horrible feeling they’re local accounts only).
In an ideal world, I’d get the client to buy a Synology NAS and use the cloud backup tools to do this. However, budget is obviously quite a big issue for a charity like this. So far, they’ve bought a consume 4TB Seagate Backup Plus drive; because it comes with ‘free’ backup software.
I explained to my contact (who is also a friend) there that this probably won’t be enough as these types of drive are generally for backing up a single workstation rather than a whole O365 instance.
I’m hoping for some low-cost solutions that could potentially run on this unused server or a similar unused system to act as a backup host with the data being written to the external drive they’ve purchased.
Bonus points for open-source, but given the nature of O365 I’m going to guess that’s not likely.
Any thoughts and suggestions are greatly appreciated.