How Teams backups work

When a new class team is created in Teams, a linked SharePoint site of the same name is also automatically created. This linked site houses the team’s files (e.g. files uploaded to the Files and Assignments tabs in team channels), but not the related student information and other details that are unique to Teams for Education (see Limitations below).

Redstor backs up both the team and the equivalent SharePoint site. Should you need to, it is possible to restore the SharePoint site without recreating the team in Teams.

  • For more on the integration between Teams and SharePoint, see Microsoft's post here.
  • For more on Redstor’s SharePoint backup and recovery, see Article 1163.

 

Limitations

We do not currently support backup and recovery of the following Education features:

  1. Assignments, including student information directly related to assignments: grades, student submissions, grading rubrics, and outcomes
  2. Students

While Assignments as a section is not supported for backup, file attachments uploaded to a channel’s Files tab (or Assignments tab, if it has been added) are backed up as SharePoint files.

For grades and grading rubrics, a possible workaround is to export the data to an Excel spreadsheet (this can be done within Teams, as in the images below). You can then save the spreadsheet in the Files or Assignments tab in the relevant channel, from where it will be backed up as a SharePoint file.


Note:

  • Due to the way Microsoft's content distribution works, it may take up to an hour to access recovered Teams for Education content.
  • Due to a Microsoft API limitation, accounts containing more than 5000 OneNote items cannot be backed up. Read more in this article on Microsoft's knowledge base.
  • To see what is currently supported by Redstor for backup and recovery in standard Teams (including non-education), see Article 1289.
  • OneNote class notebooks can only be recovered with InstantData as a folder containing standard notebooks.


 

How to recover a class team

Due to API limitations from Microsoft’s side, it is not possible for us to recover a class team such that everything looks exactly the same as before. For example, in the past, we could not support recovery of Teams channel posts back to that channel. As a workaround, we would recover the channel posts as part of a OneNote notebook associated with the recovered class.

Now, after recent OneNote API changes by Microsoft, our system cannot access notebooks as before and can no longer offer this workaround. However, this change has enabled improvements to our Teams recovery functionality, resulting in a new workflow.

In the new workflow, after recovery, the contents of the class team will be divided into two separate teams:

  1. A standard team containing only the class channels (posts and replies), but no sections (Classwork, Assignments, etc.).
  2. A class team replacing the original class, containing no channels, but all class sections.

Both team names will contain a timestamp of when the recovery was initiated. You will be able to use the channels team to immediately resume class communications, while the class team’s sections can be repopulated to resemble the original team using the equivalent files available in SharePoint. Read on for more detail.


1. Channels team

On the back end, education teams need to be created according to a specific template. However, it is not possible to recreate a team to this template during recovery, as the backed-up channel posts will be in an immutable state called migration mode. As such, channel posts are placed in a separate team as part of recovery. For the channels team, there will be no manual repopulation needed after recovery, and existing class members will be able to read, and post on, the channels again as soon as the recovery completes.

Note: Message reactions (emoji) are not currently restored.


2. Class team

When the recovery is complete, the teacher and student member names will be present in the class team. The class team will contain empty versions of the standard sections (Classwork, Assignments, etc.).

Most of the contents of these sections will be accessible from the team’s corresponding SharePoint site, which gets recovered to a new SharePoint site as part of a Teams recovery. You can also recover these files using InstantData and use them to repopulate the class sections.

To enable you to get your class teams back into a working state as soon as possible in a disaster scenario, we recommend regular disaster recovery testing.