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Select Files and Folders to Restore Instead of Complete SharePoint or OneDrive Sites
Eighteen months after Microsoft 365 Backup hit general availability, one of the most obvious omissions in the product has finally been filled in. On April 29, 2026, Microsoft announced that granular file and folder restore for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business is generally available, with deployment scheduled to complete worldwide by early May. If you’ve been protecting sites or OneDrive accounts with Microsoft’s first-party backup tool, you can now recover individual items instead of being forced to restore an entire site or account.
This is the kind of feature that most administrators probably assumed was already in the product, because every third-party Microsoft 365 backup vendor has shipped this capability for years. Microsoft is catching up rather than innovating. But the catch-up matters, because the lack of granular restore was one of the biggest reasons customers stuck with third-party tools even after Microsoft 365 Backup arrived.
A quick refresher on Microsoft 365 Backup
Microsoft 365 Backup went GA on July 31, 2024. It protects Exchange Online mailboxes, SharePoint Online sites, and OneDrive for Business accounts using two different mechanisms: copy-on-write for Exchange (the same plumbing that powers legal hold) and database-level snapshots for SharePoint and OneDrive. All backup data stays inside the Microsoft security boundary and never leaves the tenant’s geographic region.
The product is sold under Microsoft’s pay-as-you-go (PAYG) model at US$0.15 per “restorable gigabyte” per month, billed through an Azure subscription with a Syntex billing profile attached. Snapshots are retained for exactly 12 months — that hasn’t changed — and there’s still no integration with retention labels, except for the labels themselves being preserved on backed-up items.
Until this announcement, restores worked at a coarse level: you could restore an entire SharePoint site, an entire OneDrive account, or all mailbox items, optionally filtering Exchange restores by sender, recipient, subject, time range, content type, or attachment presence (capped at 1,000 items per operation). For SharePoint and OneDrive, “restore” meant restoring the whole thing.
What’s actually new
Granular browse and restore lets administrators with the SharePoint Backup Administrator role open a backup snapshot, browse or search its contents, pick specific files and folders, and restore only those items. The rest of the site or OneDrive account is untouched. That’s the headline.
A few practical details worth knowing:
- The feature is available to both Microsoft 365 Backup customers and to customers using third-party products that build on Microsoft 365 Backup Storage, since the underlying storage layer is the same.
- Restore points for granular operations are daily for the most recent 14 days and weekly beyond that. (Full-site restores have a tighter 10-minute RPO for the first 14 days; granular restores do not.)
- The SharePoint Backup Administrator role is required. This is a separate role from SharePoint Administrator, and it’s the same role that already governs full-site restores.
- Restores currently land in a new location rather than overwriting the live content. In-place restore — putting the recovered files back in their original location — is on the roadmap as item 464991, and Microsoft says it will support conflict resolution policies of Fail, Rename, or Replace.
That last point is important to understand before you plan a recovery. If a user deletes a file from a SharePoint site and you want it back where it was, you’ll restore it to a new site and then move or copy it into place yourself. That’s still much better than restoring an entire site to recover one PowerPoint deck, but it isn’t yet the seamless experience that several third-party vendors offer.
Where this leaves third-party backup tools
For years, most third-party vendors have justified their existence with three pillars: granular restore, longer retention, and more flexibility. Some vendors, such as Keepit, add the notion of backup isolation and immutability. Microsoft has now taken a chunk out of one of those main pillars, but the others are still there, and they matter.
Twelve months of retention is adequate for many cases of recovery from ransomware or operational mistakes. It is not enough for organizations that need years of recoverability for litigation, regulatory, or contractual reasons. Microsoft has said that selectable retention is a priority, but there’s no public ETA. Until that ships, customers with multi-year retention requirements still need either a third-party tool or an aggressive eDiscovery and retention-label strategy.
Pricing is another major consideration. The “restorable gigabyte” model is unusual: you pay based on the maximum size of every protected item, and that high-water mark only goes up. If you back up Anna’s 10 GB OneDrive today, she trims it to 2 GB tomorrow, and then it grows to 27 GB next week, you’ll be billed for 35 GB — the original 10 GB plus the 25 GB that was added. That can produce surprising bills on tenants with active content turnover, and granular restore doesn’t change the math. If the storage cost in your pricing calculator looks high, it’ll still look high after this update.
Then there’s restore flexibility; although this update provides better granularity, the product still lacks choices about where you restore data and whether existing data is overwritten. There’s no cross-user, cross-site, or cross-tenant restore, for example.
The biggest obstacle, of course, is that Microsoft 365 Backup is still pretty limited in scope. It doesn’t support Teams, Entra ID, Planner, or other workloads, and it holds all data inside the Microsoft ecosystem– taking away the key benefit of having your production data and your backup data stored completely separately.
Is this compelling?
Support for granular restore is a very welcome upgrade if you’re already using Microsoft 365 Backup. If you’re not already using it, you’ll want to take a good look at its pros and cons– it’s very fast and has excellent coverage for the workloads it supports, but the limited retention, limited scope, and pricing model are all questions worth thorough investigation.