Microsoft 365 Backup costs $0.15 per GB per month for the SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange content you protect. On paper, Microsoft 365 backup pricing is about as simple as cloud pricing gets.
The trouble starts when you multiply that rate by a tenant that’s been piling up mailboxes, archives, and recycle-bin leftovers for a decade.
We modeled a 3,000-person tenant against the native service and Veeam’s three per-user tiers. The native estimate came out close to triple Veeam’s cheapest list price, with a chunk of it coming from archives and recycle bins the admin center’s usage reports never show.
By the end, you’ll know what Microsoft counts toward the bill, roughly what your own tenant would pay, and when a per-user plan or a separate vault is the better buy.
What is Microsoft 365 Backup?
Microsoft 365 Backup is Microsoft’s native, pay-as-you-go backup service for SharePoint sites, OneDrive accounts, and Exchange Online mailboxes, managed from the Microsoft 365 admin center.
It takes restore points as often as every 10 minutes and is built to roll back whole sites, accounts, or mailboxes quickly after ransomware or a mass deletion.
It’s sold separately from your Microsoft 365 or Office 365 licenses and has no license of its own. The only requirements are the SharePoint or Exchange Online licenses that already cover the data, plus an Azure subscription to handle billing.
What Microsoft 365 Backup covers and doesn't
Does Microsoft 365 include backup?
Microsoft 365 doesn’t include full backup on its own. Standard Microsoft 365 and Office 365 licenses give you versioning, recycle bins, and legal holds for small recoveries, but versions don’t scale to a large ransomware recovery, and legal holds are built for eDiscovery export.
Under Microsoft’s shared responsibility model, protecting your content is your job, which is why Microsoft 365 Backup is sold as a separate pay-as-you-go product.
What Microsoft 365 Backup covers
The Microsoft 365 Backup service covers three workloads, with a few exclusions worth knowing up front:
- Workloads: SharePoint sites, OneDrive accounts, and Exchange Online mailboxes, including online archives.
- Restore points: Every 10 minutes for Exchange for the prior 52 weeks. OneDrive and SharePoint get 10-minute restore points for 14 days, then weekly ones.
- Recovery window: 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years per policy, a choice Microsoft added in September 2026. Existing policies default to 1 year.
- Storage: Backups stay inside the Microsoft 365 data trust boundary and use append-only storage.
- Not covered: Teams chats (only channel files stored in SharePoint), Entra ID, and hybrid Exchange deployments.
How Microsoft 365 Backup pricing works
Microsoft charges $0.15 per GB per month of protected content on a pay-as-you-go basis. That rate is the listed price as of July 31, 2024.
The key term is "protected." You only pay for content inside a backup policy, so you can cover every site and mailbox in the tenant or only the ones you pick. That flexibility is useful, and it’s also why two tenants with the same headcount can get very different bills.
What counts toward the bill?
Microsoft adds two buckets together:
- The user-facing size of protected content. For SharePoint and OneDrive, that’s the size in the usage reports, including the first-stage recycle bin. For Exchange, it’s the live mailbox plus its online archive.
- Deleted and versioned data held for recovery. That covers the second-stage recycle bin in SharePoint and OneDrive, plus deleted and versioned items in protected mailboxes.
Microsoft’s own example: a 1 GB site, 0.5 GB in its second-stage recycle bin, a 1 GB mailbox, and a 1 GB online archive bill as 3.5 GB.
What doesn’t change the bill?
Restores are free. Restore point frequency doesn’t materially affect the storage charge, so dialing it down won’t save money.
Azure only handles payment. There are no extra Azure API or storage charges on top of the backup usage charge.
How billing runs through Azure
Setup needs a valid Azure subscription, a resource group, a region, and Owner or Contributor access on that subscription. New customers (anyone onboarding after April 1, 2026) set it up from the Billing node in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
This year, Microsoft added departmental billing, cost attribution by protection unit, and Exchange mailbox billing attribution. That helps with chargeback. Treat the Azure subscription behind your backups with the same care as production, since turning off pay-as-you-go billing begins offboarding.
What Microsoft 365 Backup costs at real tenant sizes
Full-tenant totals catch admins off guard. One admin who ran the numbers landed at “$16.5K - $21K per month” to protect their tenant as-is.
Picture a 3,000-person company that protects its whole tenant. The per-user averages below are assumptions for illustration, so swap in your own numbers.
That’s $270,000 a year, or $7.50 per user per month.
Every 10 TB of protected data moves the bill by $1,500 a month, so the same company holding 110 to 140 TB would land between $16,500 and $21,000.
Compare the full-tenant figure to Veeam for the same 3,000 seats. At its published prices, Foundation runs $7,890 a month ($94,680 a year), Advanced $9,990, and Premium $21,000.
Our model averages 50 GB per user, which is past even Veeam Premium’s break-even point.
Selective coverage pulls the native number down fast. If you only protect the data you’d need to restore (executive mailboxes, finance and legal sites, say 30% of the tenant), the same company pays about $6,750 a month.
At the other end of the scale, Microsoft MVP Tony Redmond protected about 200 GB in his own small tenant and expected roughly $30 a month.
Costs that don’t show up in the $0.15 rate
Five details push actual bills above the back-of-envelope estimate.
1. Deleted data you’ve removed
Say a user deletes half of a 1 GB site. Microsoft keeps billing for the full 1 GB until the deleted 0.5 GB ages out of the recovery window. With the default 1-year window, data deleted in January stays on the bill until the following January.
2. Removing a site or mailbox from a policy
If you pull a site or mailbox out of a backup policy, Microsoft treats its size at removal as the ongoing "live" size until its restore points expire. You keep paying for that content for up to the length of the recovery window.
3. The recovery window you choose
The recovery window is also a cost lever. Doubling it to the new 2-year option keeps deleted and versioned content on the bill twice as long, so we’d set it per policy based on your backup retention policy and only stretch it where a regulation or legal team asks for it.
4. Teams chats and Entra ID
Microsoft 365 Backup doesn’t protect Teams chats or Entra ID. Microsoft’s separate Entra Backup and Recovery comes with Entra ID P1 or P2 licenses but keeps only seven days of daily backups. Longer Entra history and any Teams chat backup mean a second product, which makes bundled per-user plans like Veeam Advanced look cheaper by comparison.
5. What the usage reports miss
Online archives, second-stage recycle bins, and deleted mailbox items all bill at the full rate, but the admin center usage reports leave out second-stage recycle bins and online archive sizes.
Estimates built only from those reports come in low. Pulling the missing pieces takes PowerShell, which we cover in the calculator section below.
Snapshot sprawl and version growth outpace the headline storage rate across cloud backup, a pattern that reaches well beyond Microsoft 365.
Microsoft 365 Backup vs. third-party pricing at a glance
The table puts the native rate next to two common third-party options. Per-GB and per-user prices can’t be compared directly, and the next sections do that math.
Per-GB vs. per-user pricing: How to compare them
Microsoft’s bill scales with data. Most third-party bills scale with headcount. To compare them, divide the per-user price by $0.15. That gives you the break-even amount of protected data per user.
If your average user carries less protected data than the break-even figure, Microsoft’s per-GB rate costs less. Above it, the per-user plan wins on price. A user with a 15 GB mailbox and a 20 GB OneDrive is already past every break-even point except Veeam Premium’s.
The math has three caveats worth weighing before you pick:
- Selective coverage favors per-GB. Microsoft only charges for what’s in a policy, while Veeam requires every Microsoft 365 user to be protected.
- Features differ. Veeam Advanced adds Entra ID, and Premium adds Microsoft 365 disaster recovery. Microsoft’s rate covers three workloads only.
- Commitment differs. Microsoft bills monthly as you go. Veeam and CrashPlan publish annual prices.
Office 365 cloud backup pricing from third-party vendors
Microsoft renamed most Office 365 plans to Microsoft 365 (a few enterprise plans still carry the old name), so Office 365 backup pricing works the same way. Veeam and CrashPlan, two backup-as-a-service vendors buyers often compare, both price per user.
Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365
Veeam’s SaaS offering has three tiers, with annual billing as the default and unlimited storage included. Foundation ($2.63 per user per month) covers Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. Advanced ($3.33) adds Entra ID, and Premium ($7) adds Microsoft 365 disaster recovery.
Every Microsoft 365 user in the tenant must be protected, and the $2.63 Foundation price is Veeam’s volume rate for 251 or more users. Smaller tenants pay more per seat.
CrashPlan
CrashPlan charges $3.67 per user per month on an annual plan ($44 a year) or $3.29 on a two-year plan. Each user gets 50 GB of pooled cloud storage, and extra storage costs $90 a year per 250 GB.
The published price covers up to 249 users. Larger organizations go through sales, so treat the list price as a reference point for enterprise budgets.
Partner apps built on Microsoft 365 Backup Storage
Microsoft 365 Backup Storage is the API platform underneath Microsoft’s own tool, and some third-party apps run on it to get the same restore speed. Those partners set their own pricing, and Microsoft doesn’t send a separate bill.
Check one thing before you switch. Once you transfer control of your backups to a third-party app, you can’t hand it back to Microsoft’s own app yet.
How to estimate your bill with the Microsoft 365 Backup calculator
Microsoft publishes a free Microsoft 365 Backup calculator as an Excel spreadsheet. The hard part is gathering the inputs, since the spreadsheet itself only has a handful of editable cells.
- Download the spreadsheet and open the High-Level Estimates worksheet. You only edit the orange cells.
- Enter your total storage in GB. That’s live data plus recycle bins plus online archives.
- Set the percentage of storage to protect for each service. You’re only charged for protected content.
- Read the 1-month and 12-month estimates. The price-per-GB field defaults to $0.15 and can be changed.
To get accurate inputs, Microsoft’s pricing model points to Get-SPOSite for live SharePoint and OneDrive sizes, Get-PnPRecycleBinItem -SecondStage for second-stage recycle bins, and Get-MailboxStatistics -Archive for online archives.
Image: Microsoft
The calculator’s 12-month figure assumes no data growth or churn. If your tenant grows 20% a year, your second-year bill will too, so build growth in yourself.
What admins say about the per-GB bill
Two admins who looked at the rate against their own tenants put it this way:
"My quick math worked out to something north of $300 per month..." – Joseph E Moran, Commenter, Office 365 for IT Pros
At $0.15 per GB, $300 a month works out to about 2 TB of protected data, a total a 100-seat tenant can reach.
"You now have the opportunity to discuss pricing with all the backup vendors." – Tony Redmond, Microsoft MVP and article author, Office 365 for IT Pros
A published native rate gives you a benchmark to negotiate against, even if you never buy it.
Is Microsoft 365 Backup worth the cost?
It is worth the cost for fast, large-scale rollback inside Microsoft 365. Microsoft quotes median restores of 30 minutes for a single OneDrive or SharePoint unit using express restore points, and 1 to 3 TB an hour at scale.
Microsoft 365 Backup is worth it if you:
- Protect a focused subset of the tenant (regulated mailboxes, finance and legal sites) and want 10-minute restore points on it.
- Run a tenant where users average under about 20 GB of protected data.
- Want restores at no extra charge and month-to-month billing with no annual contract.
Skip it, or pair it with something else, if you:
- Need Teams chats or Entra ID protected.
- Must keep a backup copy outside Microsoft’s environment for ransomware, insider, or audit reasons.
- Carry heavy mailboxes, archives, and OneDrive accounts across thousands of users, where per-GB billing outruns per-user quotes.
Eon vs. Microsoft 365 Backup
The test for any Microsoft 365 backup is simple: if a Global Administrator account were compromised today, would you still have a copy that sits outside that tenant’s admin roles?
Microsoft’s backups stay inside the Microsoft 365 trust boundary. They’re managed from the same admin center, by the same admin roles, as production.
Microsoft adds guardrails (append-only storage, alerts to a notification list of up to 20 recipients, a 90-day grace period after offboarding). Still, the roles that manage the backup service, including Global Administrator, live in the same tenant and the same admin center as production, so a compromised admin account puts the backup settings within reach.
Eon, our cloud data protection and recovery platform, protects Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams in an immutable, logically air-gapped vault outside your tenant. The copy sits in a separate trust domain, outside the blast radius of a compromised Microsoft 365 admin account.
Eon’s add-on Ransomware Protection scans OneDrive and SharePoint backups and flags the last clean recovery point, so you restore from a copy you know is good.
After the first full copy, each daily run captures only what changed, using Microsoft Graph delta queries, so the vault stays current without re-reading the whole tenant.
Recovery is granular. You can restore a single email, a folder, or a full mailbox, files and folders in OneDrive and SharePoint, or a Teams channel, thread, or single reply, from any backed-up point in time. Exchange items restore into a new folder in the mailbox, so nothing is overwritten, and OneDrive and SharePoint items restore in place or to a separate folder. Restored items keep their permissions. You can search backups by file name and path, or by sender, recipient, subject, and date.
Outside Microsoft 365, SoFi, a customer running on AWS, cut a recovery that took a full day to minutes with Eon and saw more than 100% ROI in its first year.
Through Eon MCP, an AI agent can search protected Exchange Online, OneDrive, and SharePoint data, then find the right recovery point and submit a restore, within the signed-in user’s permissions. Sensitive restores can require multi-party approval before anything is written back.
Pricing is usage-based, with ransomware protection available as its own package on top of storage. There’s no public rate card, so you’ll need a quote.
Eon Data Protection for Microsoft 365 runs on the same platform that also protects Google Workspace and Entra ID.
The two tools do different jobs. Eon’s daily backup is built for an isolated, clean copy, so you’d still lean on Microsoft’s 10-minute restore points for everyday in-tenant recovery. The ransomware add-on covers OneDrive and SharePoint backups.
Eon is better for:
- Enterprises that need an isolated copy outside Microsoft 365 for ransomware and admin-compromise scenarios.
- Teams that restore single items often and want to search backups by file name, path, sender, or subject.
- Organizations that want Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and cloud infrastructure backup governed from one place.
Microsoft 365 Backup is better for:
- Tenants that need 10-minute restore points and the fastest bulk rollback inside Microsoft 365.
- Smaller protected footprints where the $0.15 rate stays low.
Use both if you want Microsoft’s fast in-tenant rollback for everyday incidents plus an isolated copy for the worst day. It costs more, but it’s the 3-2-1 backup rule applied to SaaS data.
The bottom line on Microsoft 365 Backup pricing
Microsoft’s per-GB rate is fair for what it buys: a fast in-tenant rollback tool billed by the gigabyte. It gets expensive in large tenants because everything in the tenant’s history counts. In our 3,000-seat model, archives and recycle bins alone added about $2,100 a month.
The bigger budget question is whether your only backup copy should live in the same tenant, under the same admin roles, as the data it protects. A low per-GB rate does little for you on the day an admin account gets compromised.
Would your Microsoft 365 backups survive a compromised Global Admin account? Book a demo and see how Eon keeps a separate copy of your Microsoft 365 data outside your tenant and restores from it.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Microsoft 365 Backup cost?
Microsoft 365 Backup costs $0.15 per GB per month of protected content, billed pay-as-you-go through an Azure subscription. The protected total includes live data, online archives, second-stage recycle bins, and deleted or versioned mailbox items. A tenant protecting 10 TB pays about $1,500 a month.
Does Microsoft 365 include backup?
No. Microsoft 365 and Office 365 licenses include versioning, recycle bins, and retention for small restores. Point-in-time backup of SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange is a separate pay-as-you-go service at $0.15 per GB per month, and third-party tools are sold separately too.
Is Office 365 backup pricing the same as Microsoft 365’s?
Yes. Microsoft renamed most Office 365 plans to Microsoft 365, and a few enterprise plans still use the old name. Either way, the backup service, the $0.15 per GB rate, and the billing model are the same.
Do restores cost extra with Microsoft 365 Backup?
No. Microsoft doesn’t bill separately for restores. The only charge is $0.15 per GB per month for protected data.
Does Microsoft 365 Backup protect Teams?
No, not fully. Microsoft 365 Backup only protects Teams channel files stored in SharePoint sites that are in a backup policy. Teams chats and other content stored on Teams servers aren’t covered.
Is there a Microsoft 365 Backup calculator?
Yes. Microsoft offers a free Excel calculator at aka.ms/M365BackupCalculator. You enter total storage and the percentage you plan to protect, and it returns 1-month and 12-month estimates that assume no data growth.
How long does Microsoft 365 Backup keep data?
Microsoft 365 Backup keeps data for 1 year by default. Since September 2026, admins can set the recovery window per policy to 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years, and longer windows keep deleted content billable for longer.
