New PowerToys releases are always greeted with excitement, particularly if there is a new module to play with. It feels like a little while since there was a new utility added, but it appears that Microsoft has a new one in the works called Alt Window Cycle. Working in a similar way to the Alt+Tab keyboard shortcut, Alt Window Cycle will introduce a new keyboard shortcut for cycling through open windows from the same application. This means that if you have multiple Word documents open, there is no need to use the Window menu to navigate between them, there will… [Continue Reading]

Microsoft 365 Backup can help strengthen your organization’s native safety net; it’s built directly into the platform you already trust, designed to recover your Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint, and OneDrive data fast when it matters most. It can be used through the Microsoft 365 admin center, and via partner applications built on the Microsoft 365 Backup Storage platform.

Here are 10 things that you should know before you enable it.

1. Resiliency with compliance built in

Protect your data without compromising on compliance.

Microsoft 365 Backup delivers data resiliency and all backup data stays within the Microsoft 365 trust boundary, in the same region and with the same data residency requirements as your live content.

Whether your organization operates under GDPR, data sovereignty mandates, or industry-specific regulations, your backup data inherits the same compliance posture as the content it protects. This is unlike export-based backup solutions, where you must apply separate compliance controls and requirements.

Learn more about privacy, security, and compliance in Microsoft 365 Backup

2. Fast restore speeds – up to 1–3 TB per hour

When something goes wrong, speed is everything.

Microsoft 365 Backup delivers restore speeds of approximately 2 terabytes per hour*, assuming an approximately 1k site parallel restore session with sites following a normal distribution of sizes. (See performance expectations for more details.)

For SharePoint and OneDrive, fast restore points typically complete in 2-20 minutes, though very large sites and accounts (such as multi-TB sites) may take an hour or more. Exchange mailbox restores process at roughly 200 to 500 items per minute per mailbox. (See performance expectations for more details.)

When you’re under pressure to get your organization back online, that speed makes all the difference.

Learn more about Backup and Restore performance

3. Built for bulk recovery after ransomware and malicious attacks

This isn’t just backup — it’s a key part of your ransomware recovery plan.

When a large-scale attack hits, you need tooling that can orchestrate recovery at the speed of the incident. Microsoft 365 Backup is purpose-built for these large-scale recovery scenarios where you need to restore hundreds or even thousands of sites or mailboxes at one time.

• Bulk restore lets you roll back affected content across your organization to a healthy pre-attack state.

• You can restore to the original location (replacing compromised data) or to a new location for investigation.

• Backups are stored on append-only storage. Any changes to the content are snapped to new backups; the system does not modify any of the existing backups. Just as importantly, there are protections and recovery options for accidental or malicious policy modifications or offboarding requests.

4. Choose what fits your scenario: fast or granular restore points

You can go back to a relevant point in time.

Daily fast restore points are optimized for the fastest possible recovery. These are the recommended options for most restore scenarios, delivering the quickest path back to a healthy state.

If you need to recover from a more specific point in time, restore points are available as frequently as every 10 minutes. We recommend using daily fast restore points for most scenarios and reserving granular restore points for situations where pinpointing the moment of recovery is critical.

 

You can perform a full site, account, or mailbox rollback to a prior point in time, or use granular file-and-folder or mail-item restore to browse and recover individual items without touching everything else.

Learn more about restoring data

5. Configure backup at scale with dynamic rules and CSV uploads

You don’t have to add sites and mailboxes one by one.

Microsoft 365 Backup gives you powerful tools to configure protection across your entire organization quickly.

• Dynamic rules – Select Distribution Lists or Security Groups to define your backup scope for OneDrive and Exchange. Membership changes are automatically re-evaluated daily, so your backup policy stays current as people join and leave teams.

• Full-workload policies (Coming soon) – Turn on automatic backup for all Exchange Online users, all OneDrive accounts, and/or all SharePoint sites in your tenant with a single toggle.

• CSV upload – Bulk-add up to 50,000 mailboxes, sites, or accounts per CSV file for precise, large-scale configuration.

Whether you’re protecting 50 users or 50,000, setup scales to match. If needed, you can also select individual artifacts from a list and back them up.

Just as importantly, you can backup your entire tenant in a matter of hours or days. No need to wait weeks, months, or longer to export copies outside of the Microsoft 365 environment.

Learn more about Backup performance

Learn more about creating and managing backup policies

6. Pay only for what you protect

No additional licenses. No upfront costs. No commitments.

Microsoft 365 Backup uses a simple pay-as-you-go model at $0.15 per GB per month of protected content, billed through your Azure subscription.

• Billing is based on the total size of content under backup protection. This includes the storage used by protected SharePoint sites, OneDrive accounts, and Exchange mailboxes as shown in their usage reports, plus second-stage recycle bin content and Exchange archive mailboxes.

Learn more about pricing

7. If you ever turn it off, there’s a 90-day safety net

Disabling backup doesn’t mean your data vanishes overnight.

If Microsoft 365 Backup is turned off (whether intentionally, accidentally, or due to a billing issue), a fixed 90-day recovery grace period begins.

During those 90 days:

• Existing backups remain fully restorable.

• Offboarding can be cancelled at any point during the grace period.

• Multi-admin notifications are triggered automatically, alerting other administrators.

• Any and all mailboxes, SharePoint sites, and/or OneDrive accounts will not be hard delete-able in the primary service. As an extra line of defense, those mailboxes, sites, and OneDrive accounts are held in a soft deleted state as long as they are backed up.

• The offboarding action is recorded in the Microsoft 365 Audit logs.

You can also offboard at the individual protection unit level — removing specific sites, mailboxes, or OneDrive accounts from backup without turning off the entire service.

Important:

Offboarding faster than 30 days is not supported under any circumstance. This is an intentional safeguard to protect the tenant and help ensure that backup data cannot be rapidly purged, even by a compromised or malicious administrator.

For mailboxes, you must first completely offboard the mailboxes from Backup before you disable or remove the primary/archive mailboxes, or move the mailbox on-prem/cross-tenant.

Learn more about offboarding

8. Stay informed about the roadmap and feature updates

Microsoft 365 Backup is actively evolving, and you can follow along.

Here’s where to stay current on what’s coming and what just shipped:

• Microsoft 365 Roadmap – Filter by “Microsoft 365 Backup” to see upcoming features, timelines, and rollout status.

• Microsoft 365 Backup Adoption Hub – Find getting-started resources, partner solutions, and community stories.

Recent highlights include the following:

• Granular file-and-folder browse and restore (now GA)

• Departmental billing for multi-subscription environments

• Government Community Cloud (GCC) availability

9. You’re not on your own; support channels are ready

If you hit a snag, help is easy to find.

Microsoft 365 Backup is supported through the same channels you already use:

• In-product support – Open a support ticket directly from Help & Support in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as per your purchased plan.

• Documentation – Explore the full Microsoft 365 Backup docs on Microsoft Learn, which cover setup, policies, restore procedures, and troubleshooting.

• Troubleshooting – Find guided walkthroughs for common issues in the Microsoft 365 Admin troubleshooting library.

10. What you need to get started

Getting started is easy.

There are two prerequisites:

1. An admin role with the right permissions

Any of the following roles can set up and manage Microsoft 365 Backup:

• Global Administrator
• SharePoint Administrator
• Exchange Administrator
• Microsoft 365 Backup Admin (dedicated role with least-privilege access)

2. A pay-as-you-go billing policy

Microsoft 365 Backup requires a pay-as-you-go billing policy, which connects the service to an Azure subscription. Creating this billing policy requires the Owner or Contributor role on the Azure subscription. If the organization doesn’t have an Azure subscription yet, one can be created during the setup process.

No agents to install, no infrastructure to provision, no additional software to deploy.

Learn more about setup

Quick reference

 

*1,000+ protection unit restore speeds published here are based on internal benchmarking where SharePoint sites have an average of 12GB of stored content per site, Exchange Online mailboxes have an average of 26K items and an aggregate size of 10 GB. Those bulk recoveries use the in-place restore option, which is typical for large scale attack recovery scenarios. Actual times will depend on the number and size of the items in each site/mailbox.

Om Malik had a wonderful ability to balance a boy-wonder enthusiasm of new technology with an appreciation of its broader impacts to society. He was an old school blogger who distilled the daily Silicon Valley zeitgeist into posts that inspired the reader to think more expansively about how tech innovation changes the world around us.

I’ll miss his old-man-on-the-hill perspective on the latest trend and his talent in explaining complex technology in a way we could all understand. 

Om’s ability to recall moments from the history of technology to point out that today’s chaotic chest-thumping is just the latest shiny object hype. His pattern-recognition fu was strong. Om’s perspective gently reminded us that the complexity of new tech eventually fades into the background where it “just works” and becomes the firmament for the next round of innovations. It is in this phase-shift when the new tech becomes ubiquitous and mundane where the biggest societal impacts are felt. This is where Om wanted us to focus our attention.

• What happens to business when bandwidth is infinate?
• What happens to innovation when computing can fit in your pocket?
• What happens to design when the UI is just your voice?

These prompts embedded in Om’s essays would lead you to ponder technology’s impact on society.

I worked for Om at Gigaom where he made a run at building an online media business on Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans axiom. The free-to-read blog was fiercely independent but was also a funnel into a monetized expert marketplace and events business. The paid sections were designed to subsidize the free so the business could minimize dependence on surveillance advertising. My time there was immensely rewarding as we punched well-above our weight, put out a great product and had a great group of people.

Sadly, we got out over our skis and short term financial incentives eroded the longer term business and the Gigaom experiment ultimately came to an end.

Looking back, over the years, Om’s posts inspired me to write as well,

Short Term vs. Long Term Metrics

On Ephemera

I also saved a few quotes over the years as keepsakes,

What will stop growing is the conversation about it. The breathless coverage of each new model announcement has a different texture than it did in 2022. The releases come faster, the benchmarks climb, but the surprise is attenuating. 2026 on AI hype cycle and what comes next

In the not-too-distant future, these workflows leave the confines of an app wrapper and become executables where our natural language will act as a scripting language for the machines to create highly personalized services (or apps) and is offered to us as an experience. 2023 on how chat+voice UI+AI personalization which spawn a new age of computing

The algorithm allows us to maintain more relationships with much less effort at almost no cost. 2016 on the tranformative power of tech

Startups are the atomic unit of innovation. 2013 at the Crunchies

If someone can become the Dolby of the web — remove the noise and give us clear sound — then they are going to make a lot of money. – 2008 on intelligent filters

I’ll miss having Om as a reference point, waypoints for our collective future. His works would make a great training set for an AI chatbot but, without his sharp wit, appreciation of the analog, and humanity, it would ultimately be lacking.

R.I.P.

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Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Mythos is back 2) OpenAI releases GPT-5.6 to a small group 3) Should the government pick winners? 4) Is this a blessing to open source AI? 5) Is the gating of frontier models bad for these companies businesses? 6) Frontier lab customers are finding cheaper ways to do business 7) There's a bunch of overbilling happening in opaque AI systems 8) Is SpaceX's valuation frothy? 9) Apple's price raises: Greed or not? 10) Apple's impact on the memory space 11) Rest in peace, Om Malik

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Welcome to F# Weekly,

A roundup of F# content from this past week:

In part 11 of my event sourcing series, I discuss consistency and why we don't use aggregates or dynamic consistency boundaries to solve it:www.planetgeek.ch/2026/06/23/e… #EventSourcing #dotnet #fsharp

— Urs Enzler (@ursenzler.bsky.social) 2026-06-23T08:20:00.650Z

Microsoft News

• AI-Powered MSBuild Investigation with the Microsoft Binlog MCP Server – .NET Blog
• Azure Functions MCP Extension: What’s New at Build 2026 – Azure SDK Blog
• Meet your agent harness and claw | Microsoft Agent Framework
• Visual Studio Code 1.126

Videos

• Avalonia 12 – Set Up Your Dev Environment in 9 Minutes
• ASP.NET Community Standup: Better AI for .NET developers with dotnet/skills
• .NET Data Community Standup: Temporal tables and constraints in SQL Server and PostgreSQL 18
• .NET AI Community Standup: Multi-Agent Apps with Aspire + MAF
• On .NET Live – An In-Depth Introduction to Agentics

Blogs

• Dag Brattli: Fable REPL now compiles F# to Erlang (BEAM)
• Urs Enzler: Event Sourcing — Aggregates, Dynamic Consistency Boundaries or What?
• SpeakEZ.tech: Between a Rocq and a Hard Case
• Tuomas Hietanen: FsLemming — Lemmings clone with F# MailboxProcessors
• Between Rocq & A Hard Case – Clef Programming Language

The Fable Repl has been updated to include BEAM, and now compiles F# code to Erlang fable.io/repl/ #fsharp #fablecompiler

— Dag Brattli (@dbrattli.bsky.social) 2026-06-17T19:06:02.027Z

Highlighted projects

• MagnusOpera/FScript — Functional language interpreter, F#/ML inspired, with LSP support
• DataficationSDK/Verso — Extensible interactive notebook platform for .NET; runs in VS Code and the browser
• Thorium/FsLemming — Lemmings clone demonstrating F# message-passing MailboxProcessors
• AngelMunoz/Migrondi — Simple SQL migrations tool; 1.3.0 beta adds a GUI app and an MCP server

New Releases

• Fable.Core 5.1.0
• Navs 1.0.0
• NBomber 6.5.0
• WebSharper 10.1.6.676
• G-Research.FSharp.Analyzers 0.23.0
• FSharp.Analyzers.SDK 0.37.2
• Facil 3.0.0
• Fable.Python 5.3.0
• Frank 7.2.1
• Funogram.Telegram 10.1.0

F# Fable 5 + GitHub hosting! A few retro-spirit items:- Combination counting, how I learned to calculate as a kid: thorium.github.io/Kasino/- My 28-year-old 5-in-a-row ported: thorium.github.io/thomoku/- Cave-rocket clone: thorium.github.io/FsRocket/- Ice hockey: thorium.github.io/FsHockey/

— Tuomas Hietanen (@thoriumi.bsky.social) 2026-06-19T09:05:31.393Z

That’s all for now. Have a great week.

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