Quickstart Guide for Microsoft 365 Backup with MSP360 and Backblaze B2 (Multiple Instances)

Welcome to our Quickstart guide for Backblaze B2 and MSP360 Microsoft 365 Backup. With Backblaze B2 and MSP360 Microsoft 365 Backup, you will be able to automate your Microsoft 365 backups and secure them offsite. This guide will walk you through the required steps to set up your Microsoft 365 Backup to use with Backblaze B2 via MSP360 Managed Backup Service (MBS) to back up multiple instances of Microsoft 365. 

NOTE: If you wish to only back up a single Microsoft 365 instance, please use our separate guide for single instance backup here.

Step 1: Setting up your Backblaze B2 account

To start, you will need to create a Backblaze B2 account. You can do this by clicking this link to our Backblaze B2 page and clicking the red “Sign Up Now” button.

Step 2: Creating a B2 bucket

After successfully creating your Backblaze account, we will now want to create a B2 bucket which is where your MSP360 Microsoft 365 backups will be stored on our end.

To start, click on the “Buckets” page in the left navigation menu:

Click on the “Create a Bucket” button and enter your desired bucket name. Please ensure you choose a globally unique name. Once you have entered a bucket name, leave all remaining settings unchanged.

You will then see the following screen after creating your new B2 bucket:

Step 3: Creating Application Keys

Before we move on to Microsoft 365 Backups with MSP360, there is one more step we should do which is to create an Application Key which will be covered next.

Once you click on the link shown in the screenshot above, you will be brought to the “Buckets” page. To create an application key, click on the “App Keys” section in the left navigation menu and click the “Add a New Application Key” button.

Type in the desired name of the key in the “Name of Key:” field. Leave the rest of the settings unchanged. Now click on the blue “Create New Key” button to create the new key that we will be using with the MSP360 Microsoft 365 backup client. 

Once you have created the key, it will appear in a blue section (seen below). As you can see, the key will only be shown here once (refreshing or leaving this page will cause the key to not display again). It is advisable to save the key credentials offline in a safe place before leaving this page. Rest assured that you can easily create another application key entirely should you lose access to this one. Doing so will invalidate your previous keys.

Step 3: Setting up Microsoft 365 Backups with MSP360 and creating a backup plan

From here, you will now sign into your MSP360 account on the MSP360 Backups website. Enter your MSP360 account credentials and click “Login”.

You can enable Two-Factor Authentication on the following screen. We strongly recommend doing so to increase the security of your account. 

You will be given 3 choices: Servers and Workstations, Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, and Hyper-V or VMware. Select Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.

Next, you will enter the Bucket Name and Application keyID and Application Key information which we created:

Next, select the appropriate backup service you wish to create. In the context of this guide, it would be either Microsoft 365 Business or Microsoft 365 Personal.

You should then be prompted to sign in once again this time using a Microsoft account with global administrator access which is tied to your Microsoft 365 environment.

You will need to grant permission for MSP360 Microsoft 365 Backup to access your Microsoft 365 environment.

You should then be brought back to the previous page which should now show you as signed into the appropriate Microsoft account. 

From here, select the services you wish to back up from your Microsoft environment.

You can then select which users to back up, as well. NOTE: This user list may not populate immediately and may require a short while to show the full list of users (seen below).

You will now see a Summary of the Microsoft 365 backup:

After clicking “Run Backup”, your new Microsoft 365 backup will start and you will be redirected to the MSP360 Managed Backup Service interface. This interface allows you to review and manage your backup settings, as well as an overview of your existing backups.