#Split-Off and Pause Backups

If an incremental backup job for SharePoint Online/OneDrive/Project Online/Exchange Online/Teams/Groups has been running for 47 hours, we will look into it, and identify if there is a higher volume of changes or very large sites/mailboxes that are causing the job to run longer. Rather than let these large sites/mailboxes slow down the rest of your backups, we will split off the running sites/mailboxes into their own backup process, which will continue to run in the background. Long-running full backup jobs will not be automatically split off and the incremental backup jobs will run in parallel. For any content we’ve already finished protecting, we’ll mark this job as “Partially Finished” in the backup dashboard to set a valid restore point. Any sites/mailboxes that are still in the queue to be backed up will be skipped and will be automatically included in the next backup, which should be kicking off shortly to maintain the best SLA.

The site collections/mailboxes that are currently being backed up will keep running in the background.

For Teams/Groups long-running backups, the split-off will happen when all the following conditions are met.

You can download the job report from Job Monitor to check the backup of the site collections/mailboxes that are currently being protected and the site collections/mailboxes that have been skipped but will be automatically included in the next backup job.

For SharePoint Online sites and Exchange Online mailboxes, you can also navigate to Job analytics > Extended backup overview tab to check for the progress of the content being protected. Note that Project Online and Teams service has not yet supported this feature.

If the backup job hasn’t been completed after running for total of 28 days, it will be stopped. The remaining content in the backup will be automatically included in the next backup job. Note that the job pausing does not apply to Exchange Online backups. The Exchange Online backup job will run to the end. You will receive the following email notifications to check the job details: