application, Microsoft Teams needs to be protected by
regularly backing up its data.
How Do You Back Up Teams?
One of the first things that needs to be considered is how to
back up Microsoft Teams. As I'm sure you know, Teams is a
part of Microsoft 365. So, if you want to back up Teams, you
will need to back up Microsoft 365.
One of the things that makes backing up Microsoft Teams so
interesting though, is that Teams isn't what I would consider to
be a self-contained application. To show you what I mean,
consider the way that Microsoft Exchange Server works.
Whether it's running on premises or in the Microsoft 365
cloud, Exchange Server is designed to store user mailboxes
within the Exchange Information Store databases. These
databases are a part of the Exchange Server application.
Microsoft Teams works differently. Rather than Teams data
being stored within the Teams application, it is widely
scattered throughout the Microsoft 365 cloud. Different types
of Teams content are stored in different locations. Here is a
breakdown of where Teams data is stored:
•
Message Data
– Message data is currently stored in a
chat service table, but will eventually be stored in
Cosmos DB. The chat data is also brought into
Microsoft Exchange for compliance reasons.
•
Images
– Images are stored within the Media Services
on Azure (in Blob storage). Like message data, images
are imported into Exchange for compliance reasons.
•
Files
– Microsoft Teams stores files in different
locations depending on the file type. Team files are
