Backing up Microsoft Exchange e-mails

We use Microsoft Exchange Online for our company e-mail. E-mails are kept in the cloud and also on the users workstation.

Other than this, we keep no data on workstations. All of our data is on our server and we only backup our server.

I wish we could direct the local copy of the e-mail to be saved on a network drive, but Microsoft will not let that happen.

If an e-mail gets deleted it is gone from both the workstation and the cloud.

Does anybody have any solutions for backing up e-mails? Or getting another copy saved on our server so we can back it up there?

I use Outlook to download all my emails

Then I am using IDrive for backups. I believe they have a version that will backup directly from the cloud.

Thank you for the reply.

Yes. We also use Outlook on the workstations which downloads the emails to the user's C: drive.

Can you please confirm? Are you saying that IDrive may have a version that will back up directly from the Microsoft cloud?

You can have each user create a PST file that they store on the server. Then create a rule in Outlook that automatically copies each message received and sent and saves the message in the PST file on the server.

The rule will only work on the local version, not on the cloud version.

you will end up with a massive PST file. So you'll need to clear it out occasionally. i used to create a new PST file for each calendar year.

I technically use Exchange, too, but it is through Office 365 E1 or something like that (cannot recall, I have various subscriptions). I then use Spanning Backups to back up everything in Exchange, OneDrive, Calendar, and Contacts. Spanning has been VERY reliable for me, but it sounds like you may also need to place litigation holds on your Exchange--serves multiple purposes, including being able to at least see the content of a deleted e-mail, though I believe it can also be restored. Been a while since I tested, but I also thought Exchange had a temporary holding period for deleted e-mails in case they need to be recovered.

I then have rotating backups at local level, which captures everything in Outlook data file.