u/Smile4menow84

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.