1321 - How to back up Teams for Education

Backup of Teams forms part of our Microsoft 365 service offering. You can backup and recover teams, channels, posts, files and tabs. However, we do not currently support backup and recovery of the following features specific to Teams for Education:

1. Assignments, including student information directly related to Assignments: Grades, Student Submissions, Grading Rubrics, and Outcomes
2. Students

File attachments within the Files and Assignments tabs, including uploads by the teacher and submission uploads by the students, are backed up as SharePoint files and can be recovered with InstantData.

How does Teams backup work?

When a new Team is created in Teams, a linked SharePoint site of the same name is also automatically created. This linked site houses the same files as the Teams site (i.e. files uploaded to the Files and Assignments tabs), but not the related student information and other details that are unique to Teams for Education. The only details that are retained are the class name and all members (both teachers and students). 

How do I protect my Education Teams?

Until we can fully support all features of Teams for Education, any files that you would like to back up should be uploaded to either the relevant channel's Files or Assignments tab in Teams for Education. For Grades and Grading Rubrics, a possible workaround is to export the data to an Excel spreadsheet (this can be done within Teams, as in the images below), then save the spreadsheet in the Files or Assignments tab, from where it can be backed up and recovered.

Note: It ts not currently possible to recover an Education Team into a new or existing Team such that all surrounding student information is present, and everything looks exactly the same as before.

We recommend regularly testing disaster recovery scenarios.

• For more on the integration between Teams and SharePoint, see Microsoft’s post here.
• For more on recovering SharePoint files, watch our video or read our guide here.