M365 Backup at Scale (~150TB) – AvePoint vs alternatives?

Posted by Smile4menow84@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 43 comments

After \~2 years of pushing internally, I’ve finally got budget approved for a proper M365 backup solution.

Our environment is fairly large:

\~140TB across Exchange + OneDrive

\~8TB SharePoint

A lot of this is sitting in OneDrive Plan 2 accounts (25TB each) acting as “cold storage” for media

I’ve been testing a few options:

Veeam

AFI.ai

AvePoint

Where I’ve landed so far: AvePoint is currently the front runner purely because of pricing model. It doesn’t care about data size — just licenses per object.

£3.30 per object

\~330 objects total

\~£1,089/month

Shared mailboxes included

At our scale, that pricing model just works.

The problem: I’m really not a fan of AvePoint’s restore experience. It feels clunky and in some cases requires downloading data locally and re-uploading, which isn’t ideal.

AFI.ai actually felt much better from a product perspective (especially restores), but their data-based pricing just doesn’t scale for us. Costs get out of hand quickly.

What I’m trying to figure out:

Is there anything else out there at a similar price point that handles large data volumes well?

Ideally with a better restore experience?

How are others handling restores at this scale — is the download/re-upload approach just the reality here?

Would appreciate any real-world feedback before I lock this in.

[-]

SecrITSociety@reddit

Veeam has a new cloud offering they're pitching us that's per user priced/unlimited storage that would run us about $30k/year for 750+ users. Was this a part of your discussion with them, or was it just licensing for their on-prem solution?

individual101@reddit

Yea the Veeam Data Cloud. They tried getting us to move to it too. We currently run to an on prem Minio object storage and send a copy to Wasabi

Just FYI, Might want to reconsider Wasabi, soo many data corruption events last year 😯

Oh I didn't hear about those

They were not really forthcoming, Veeam gave us more info than Wasabi did 🙄

Here's a relevant thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/s/Lwk3jVy0Bg

jstuart-tech@reddit

We sell https://1111systems.com/services/cloud-backup-microsoft-365/ at work and it's fine, apparently uses Veeam in the backend. Should fit your pricing as well (They have a calculator on the website)

Elensea@reddit

Just sat through a demo with proof point a they were big on the unlimited archive. I didnt need it so we went with avanan. Here’s the brochure though. https://www.proofpoint-total-protection.com/app/uploads/2025/12/365TBackup_Factsheet_us.pdf

Difficultopin@reddit

Metallic

MysticalNinja1991@reddit

Avepoint or Ruberik

H2CO3HCO3@reddit

u/Smile4menow84, you submitted the same question on a different x-post and since I've already replied to your question in your other post, I will point you there instead:

https://reddit.com/r/Backup/comments/1spd28e/m365_backup_at_scale_150tb_avepoint_vs/

joeprettyman10@reddit

Where I work, we use Datto SaaS protection There are multiple retention options Pricing is per user, no limit on data Shared mailboxes and sharepoint included at no additional cost. Only caviot I can think of is the OneDrive Plan 2. If a user only has that license (ie no exchange license), then you will be billed for a user, but if the user is licensed for P2 and Exchange, then it is covered under 1 cost.

JeroenPot@reddit

I would go for acronis or dropsuite.

Parity99@reddit

I'm using AvePoint, at larger scale than your environment and have just renewed for 3 more years. Have never had to restore local then upload. This covers, EOL, SPOL, PowerPlatform etc, Teams data, the works.

ShadowKnight45@reddit

This. Curious where OP is encountering export then upload. AFAIK only a few niche Power Platform backups require this.

Legionof1@reddit

Could just get a Synology and keep a local backup

Ok-Butterscotch-4858@reddit

This!

2 years back brought 2x with 100tb raid 5 works a treat.

Was about £5500 each but definitely worth it.

SalzigHund@reddit

How long does it take to rebuild the RAID when a drive dies?

To be honest I’m not really sure lol. I’ve done it once actually and maybe 3ish days? I didn’t want to bother and wasn’t bothered so plugged in made sure it was doing a rebuild and left it. It’s the RS1221+

I’m guessing they are relatively fast drives then? We took over a Synology loaded with 5400 RPM 8 TB drives and the rebuild took a week

These Toshiba MG08ACA16TE 16TB 7.2K 512M 3.5" SATA Enterprise NAS Hard Drive 16TB

Appreciate you

No worries!

It’s the Toshiba MG Enterprise Capacity ones.

ofd227@reddit

They had a breach (which happens) but devices to.try and downplay it (which is bad. Take that for what you will

mdj@reddit

Full disclosure: I work for Cohesity.

We have Cohesity Cloud Services for a Backup-as-a-Service solution with a range of per-user licenses (10GB, 20GB, 50GB Front End data size per user) so you can mix and match to get the "right" amount of data for your user count. I've never seen a situation where we had to download data locally to restore it, and we have customers with significantly larger M365 estates than you describe. There's a 30 day free trial you can request from our website.

We also support protecting the data in AWS instead of Azure if you want, and support scanning the backed up data for IOCs.

Secret_Account07@reddit

So we just recently migrated to Cohesity after many years using TSM for VE (garbage product) and I’ve been impressed.

It’s technically IBM storage defender but I believe it’s all Cohesity under the hood.

I’m a fan. Full VM and file restore work flawlessly. With our last product a 1TB VM restore could take over a day. Now it can be done in a few hours.

I’m not involved in pricing so can’t speak to that but it’s great. We have a lot of objects too. PBs of VMs.

Cormacolinde@reddit

I was about to mention Cohesity! I work for a Cohesity Cloud partner and it’s really good and reasonably priced. We have been moving away from competitors because Cohesity is just much better.

thefpspower@reddit

N-able Cove for 365 is direct to cloud in my experience and its quite good now, before people didn't like it because it didn't export PSTs, now it does.

I think they work as a storage pool per use though, so if you have 200 users you'd have a pool of 200TB for whatever, if that's valid for you maybe ask for a demo and see if you like the restore experience.

blasted_heath@reddit

We get Cove from our MSP. It has been nothing but a dumpster fire. Took 7 months to do our initial backup. Sync is slow and takes multiple days for our exchange environment to complete. Currently starting the process of getting our contract cancelled and getting a refund for 1.5 years of licensing a product that we've not even been able to do a DR test with.

Jesus, 7 months?

How many TBs is that?

Damn 7 months is disasterous! How big is your 365?

It has worked just fine for us but we're not that big.

Smile4menow84@reddit (OP)

Ha, Snap

I'm currently running my first full backup using a 31 day trial on N-able Cove.

UI looks nice.

Just need to check how restores work and what pricing will be like.

What systems are that price?

That's not an option for us. I would need at least 500TB usable data. Cloud backup only.

Antoine-UY@reddit

Many companies sell "seats" (unlimited size) for Acronis CyberProtect.

What's the real world scenario like using this? How are restores.

Acronis, I'll check them out....