Microsoft 365 Backup Pricing 2026: Veeam vs Acronis vs Datto vs Keepit, per User

Microsoft 365 holds a small company's email, files, Teams chats and SharePoint sites. Most owners assume Microsoft backs all of that up. It keeps the service running and keeps several copies of the current data. It does not keep a history you can roll back to after a bad week.

I should say where I stand. From 2019 to 2024 I ran Aliteq, a PC hardware shop in Kathmandu where we built, repaired and sold machines. Today Aliteq is a US-based company and I build AI apps. I have never sold or run Microsoft 365 backup for anyone, so nothing here comes from managing it. What I did is read Microsoft's documentation and each vendor's own pricing page, and multiply the published prices out for 10, 25 and 50 users.

Does Microsoft back up Microsoft 365?

Not in the way most people mean. Microsoft protects the service against its own failures, but your data, and getting it back after a deletion or a ransomware attack, is your job. Its shared-responsibility guidance says that "regardless of the type of deployment", the customer always keeps responsibility for "your data, including data classification, data protection, encryption decisions".

Microsoft repeats this in the FAQ for its own backup product. Asked whether its stance on shared responsibility has changed, it answers: "No, we still have the same point of view, but are now offering more tools to help organizations achieve those goals and responsibilities." The same FAQ explains why the built-in copies aren't backups. A disaster-recovery copy "maintains the current state of content, not any historical versions." Version history "might also be exhausted". Legal holds are "optimized for export (for example, via eDiscovery), not for mass restore."

How long Microsoft 365 keeps deleted data on its own

Without a backup, deleted data sits in recycle bins for 14 to 93 days, then it's gone. These are Microsoft's own default windows:

The SharePoint support article puts it plainly: an item stays in the second-stage recycle bin "for the remainder of the 93 days, and then is permanently deleted." For email, Exchange Online keeps permanently deleted items "for 14 days, by default", and you can raise that "up to a maximum of 30 days."

Retention policies in Microsoft Purview can keep content longer. Their stated purpose is to "prevent permanent deletion and remain available for eDiscovery". That's a compliance tool. It helps a lawyer find an email. It won't put 40,000 encrypted files back where they were on Monday morning. If you want the wider picture of what a real backup needs, our plain-English guide to backups and losing everything covers it.

Microsoft 365 backup prices per user, side by side

The published prices run from $0.42 to $3.75 a user a month for a small company. Five vendors print a price; five more sell only on quotes.

How I read each price:

• Veeam. The product page lists Foundation at $2.63, Advanced at $3.33 and Premium at $7 per user per month billed annually. The fine print says the first two are "represented as volume discount for 251+ users." For a small company, the real price is the online store's $42 a user a year, which is $3.50 a month.
• Afi. Its pricing page shows $3 a user a month on yearly billing and $5 on monthly billing, "starting from 5 users". You can license "all or only a subset of your users".
• IDrive. "$20.00/Seat/Year", with "Monthly plans available at $2/Seat". A seat is a Microsoft 365 user, and you need at least one to back up SharePoint sites and Teams.
• CubeBackup. $5 a user a year, and "backups for Shared drives, Microsoft Teams and SharePoint sites are free of charge". It runs on your own server, and you pay for the storage it writes to.
• Microsoft. "The list price is $0.15/GB/month of protected content." See the next section for what counts.

Which vendors don't publish a price?

Keepit, Datto, Acronis, Cloudally, Spanning and SysCloud don't list a Microsoft 365 backup price on their own pages. Third-party sites print figures for several of them. I couldn't confirm any on the vendor's site, so none appear here.

• Keepit. All three tiers (Core Continuity, Business Resilience, Enterprise Resilience) say "Contact sales".
• Datto SaaS Protection. Datto's pricing page is "Pricing for Datto Partners". It's sold through managed service providers, who set their own price. If an MSP runs your IT, it's often bundled; our managed IT pricing guide shows what those contracts cost.
• Acronis. Microsoft 365 backup is "only supported in Acronis Cyber Protect Backup Advanced edition" and sold "in five seat-based packs". The purchasing page shows no price for those packs.
• OpenText Cloudally. Priced "Per user" or "Per 10GB (per service)", behind a "Get pricing" form.
• Spanning. The vendor FAQ says it's priced per user per year, with a minimum of 25 users. No figure on the vendor's pages.
• SysCloud. No price, and a "minimum licenses required for new account" of 100.

What Microsoft 365 Backup actually costs per user

At $0.15 per GB a month, Microsoft's own backup costs about $3.75 a user if each person has 25 GB to protect. That 25 GB is my assumption for a typical office user's mailbox, archive, OneDrive and share of SharePoint. At 10 GB it's $1.50. At 50 GB it's $7.50.

The billable size is bigger than most admins expect. Microsoft's pricing page says it counts the live size of protected OneDrive accounts and SharePoint sites "which includes the first-stage recycle bin", plus mailboxes "plus their associated online archives", plus deleted content in the second-stage recycle bin and deleted or versioned mail items. Its own example: a 1 GB site with 0.5 GB in its second-stage bin, plus a 1 GB mailbox with a 1 GB archive, bills as 3.5 GB.

Deleting data doesn't lower the bill right away. Microsoft gives the case of a 1 GB site cut to 0.5 GB: "your next monthly bill will still be for 1 GB since the backup tool is retaining that deleted content for a year." Two things are free. "Restores are free", and there are "no additional Azure API or storage costs" beyond the per-GB charge.

To size it, Microsoft offers a pricing calculator spreadsheet. It needs your tenant's total storage, including recycle bins and archives, which PowerShell reports more completely than the admin center.

What each option includes

The prices hide real differences in coverage. Microsoft's product skips Teams. Retention runs from two years to unlimited. Restore granularity differs too.

A few details matter more than the table shows:

• Microsoft 365 Backup covers OneDrive, SharePoint and Exchange Online only. The recovery window is "3 months, 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years", one year by default. You restore a whole OneDrive account or SharePoint site to a point in time, and mail items one by one. Its feature table still lists file restore via versions as "coming soon". It does have a strong point: backups are "immutable unless expressly deleted by the Backup tool admin", and data "never leaves the Microsoft 365 data trust boundary."
• Veeam Data Cloud includes "unlimited storage", lets you "choose your storage location; customize retention policies", and covers "Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams". Premium adds "bulk restore at scale for disaster recovery" and says it meets "the 3-2-1 rule".
• Afi lists Teams, Planner, OneNote and Copilot data, "unlimited time / number of versions" of retention, and backups "up to 3x / day".
• Keepit lists "Groups and Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange Online", "always-hot storage", "no egress, ingress or transaction fees", "4 copies in 2 separated data centers", and says it's "free for inactive users". Retention is 5 years on Core Continuity and 10 on the higher tiers.
• Datto SaaS Protection offers "3x daily, automated backups" and "point-in-time, granular, and non-destructive restore", covering Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and Exchange.

One trade-off runs through all of this. Microsoft's backup lives inside Microsoft 365. That's why it restores fast. It's also why a third-party copy, stored elsewhere, counts as a separate copy for the 3-2-1 rule (three copies, two media, one off-site), and Microsoft's own doesn't in the same way.

Cost for 10, 25 and 50 users

For 25 users, the published options cost $10 to $94 a month, or about $375 to $3,375 over three years. The full table:

How I built it, so you can swap in your own numbers:

• Users × price × 36. Every row is the per-user monthly price times the user count, then times 36 months. Three-year totals for 10 and 50 users scale the same way: Afi is $1,080 and $5,400, Veeam Foundation $1,260 and $6,300.
• Microsoft at 25 GB a user. At 10 GB, 25 users cost $37.50 a month. At 50 GB they cost $187.50. Data growth and deleted data held for the recovery window would raise it. Measure your tenant before choosing.
• Not included: tax, setup time, and for CubeBackup the server and storage it writes to.

The spread is narrower than it looks. For 25 users, the difference between Afi and Microsoft is $18.75 a month. Coverage, retention and where the copy lives should decide it more than price.

Which one fits a small company

Start with what you need to restore, then where the copy should live, then price. Four quick rules, based on these published terms and not on running any of them myself:

1. You want it inside Microsoft and you don't use Teams much. Microsoft 365 Backup is simple to switch on in the admin center and restores fast. Check your tenant's real size first, since you pay per GB.
2. You want a copy outside Microsoft with Teams included. Afi at $3 or Veeam Data Cloud at $3.50 publish clear prices with storage included. Veeam's $2.63 needs 251+ users.
3. You're on a tight budget. IDrive at $20 a user a year includes unlimited storage. CubeBackup and Synology cost even less, but you run the server and storage yourself.
4. An MSP runs your IT, or you need long retention. Ask your MSP about Datto SaaS Protection, and get a Keepit quote if you need five or more years. Get it in writing.

Whatever you buy, test a restore of one mailbox and one SharePoint folder in the first week. A backup you have never restored from is a guess. The rest of the Cloud & IT Infrastructure section prices the other decisions on the same list.