What items can be backed up?

You can back up SharePoint classic site collections, group (team) sites, and communication sites. Also, it is possible to choose individual subsites, lists, and libraries for backup.

The following items are skipped during a backup:

• The What items can be backed up?

  You can back up SharePoint classic site collections, group (team) sites, and communication sites. Also, it is possible to choose individual subsites, lists, and libraries for backup.

  The following items are skipped during a backup:

  • The Look and Feel site settings (except for Title, description, and logo).
  • Site page comments and page comments settings (comments On/Off).
  • The Site features site settings.
  • Web part pages and web parts embedded in the wiki pages (due to SharePoint Online API limitations).
  • Checked out files—files that are manually checked out for editing and all files that are created or uploaded in libraries, for which the option Require Check Out was enabled. To backup these files, first check them in.
  • OneNote files (due to SharePoint Online API limitations).
  • External data and Managed Metadata types of columns.
  • The default site collection "domain-my.sharepoint.com". This is a collection where all of the organization users’ OneDrive files reside.
  • The contents of the recycle bin.

Limitations

• Titles and descriptions of sites/subsites/lists/columns are truncated during a backup if the title/description size is greater than 10000 bytes.

What items can be recovered?

The following items can be recovered from a site backup:

• Entire site
• Subsites
• Lists
• List items
• Document libraries
• Documents
• List item attachments
• Site pages and wiki pages

You can use search to locate the items.

Items can be recovered to the original or a non-original site. The path to a recovered item is the same as the original one. If the path does not exist, it is created.

You can choose whether to recover the sharing permissions or let the items inherit the permissions from the parent object after the recovery.

The following items cannot be recovered:

• Subsites based on the Visio Process Repository template.
• Lists of the following types: Survey list, Task list, Picture library, Links, Calendar, Discussion Board, External, and Import Spreadsheet.
• Lists for which multiple content types are enabled.