Overview of SharePoint and Teams Recovery

Below is an overview of what to expect from a recovery perspective for SharePoint and Teams.  The big piece to note is that, in both cases, the hierarchy and any customizations must exist in the destination.  This would typically be satisfied if recovering to the original source, but not if recovering to an empty site, in which case a fair amount of work might be required to get things created and customized as needed for a successful restore.  Specifically:  

• Recovery of a site will recursively recover any subsites and lists PROVIDED those subsites and lists already exist in the destination with matching names.  Automatic creating of missing sites and lists is not supported.
  • Proper Hierarchy should be present. We do not create sites, subsites, or libraries/lists during restores.
• Recovery of a list will recursively recover all folders and items.  Missing folders are created for document libraries.
  • Attachments of the list items are not backed up.
  • Certain types of lists are not restored properly - Issue Tracker, Content Scheduler, Recruitment Tracker, Employee Onboarding, etc.
• Recovery of an item will restore the specified version (usually the most recent), along with all metadata.  Restoring all versions in a single export job is also an option.  
• Recovery of both document libraries and any other list type (tasks, custom, etc.) is supported.
• Recovery of sites/lists can only function if the destination has the same customizations, content types, etc.
• The Export Utility will allow you to dynamically browse the destination site, to easily select the desired destination.
• Veritas Alta SaaS Protection does not support the capture or restoration of workflow related information.
• Veritas Alta SaaS Protection does not disable workflows during restoration, which means the restore can trigger unintended workflows.
• Veritas Alta SaaS Protection does not capture or restore document/version comments.
• Veritas Alta SaaS Protection does not capture or restore approval comments.
• When restoring items to lists requiring approval, Veritas Alta SaaS Protection can not maintain the original author/date, since the act of approving the items stamps those two key pieces of metadata with the SharePoint App we are running as.  To mitigate this, Veritas Alta SaaS Protection will add a comment in such cases indicating the original author and date.
• Document Library setting "Require Check Out" needs to be disabled in order to restore the documents to the Document Library. If enabled while restoring, this setting sometimes causes the document to be created in the library but not visible to us which results in error during subsequent restores - Document already exists.
      ○ To overcome this situation, we need to restore the documents in the same document library(require checkout disabled) using the force overwrite option and select the versioned document behavior.
• Stubbing is not supported for Document Libraries where the setting "Require Check Out" is enabled.

 Teams has some additional capabilities and restrictions to be aware of:

1.  Teams conversations are captured from the Teams mailboxes and the individual user mailboxes.  These should be considered a compliance copy since they cannot be used to restore conversations back into Teams.  Indeed this capability (restoring Team conversations so they show up in Teams) is not supported, and not on the near-term roadmap, due to API limitations that exist in the Teams API.
2. Team documents are captured from the site collection for the team.  These can be restored as specified in the above rules.
3. Team Wikis are supported.  Note that restored posts will have the time set to when the restore was performed, and if the editor/author was not a member of the Team, the author will be displayed as the user who performed the restore.
4. Other Team content types are not tested to be fully supported.  Some may work to greater or lesser extents.

Below is an example recovery case: All access is lost to a Team site collection and the Team must be recreated and recovered from scratch.  The recovery process would look as follows:

1. Create the new destination team.
2. Create the channels for the team.
3. Add the users for the team.
4. Add any other resources to the team (wikis, planner, customizations, etc.).
5. In some cases, it is as easy as restoring the source site collection’s top-level site to the newly created team’s top-level site, using the Veritas Alta SaaS Protection Export Utility. 
6. If there are any issues (names don’t match exactly etc.), you can restore list-by-list, using the Veritas Alta SaaS Protection Export Utility.