Avoiding throttling of SharePoint and Teams backups

This article describes the throttling issue resulting in delayed or unsuccessful backups for some SharePoint or Team Sites. Tips to help organizations avoid throttling are included as well.

Throttling

To maintain performance of its SharePoint and Teams cloud services, Microsoft limits the number of API calls that an organization can make to these services within a certain time period. Microsoft also limits the number of files that can be accessed within a fixed duration. The limit is intended to prevent overuse of resources.

When an organization exceeds a service's usage limit, additional requests made within the time period fail. This is called throttling.

Backup Issues

The key reasons resulting in throttling of an organization's SharePoint and Teams backups are the following:

  • Total file size
  • Number of API calls exceeds limit
  • Large number of files stored in SharePoint or Teams

File size limitations

Datto SaaS Protection does not currently support backups of large SharePoint or Team file repositories.

The total file size that can be backed up during the backup process depends on many factors. This includes the type of data being stored, the rate of data change, and the number of items being backed up.

Consider a SharePoint site made up of several terabytes (TB) that includes several hundred-thousand files. As the volume of data is much higher than normal, the initial ingest would take quite a long time. Additionally, if the data was updated frequently, subsequent backup attempts would get throttled as well since all data changes would need to be captured.

API call limitations

When Datto SaaS Protection takes a snapshot of an organization's data, it checks to see if any files have been added, removed, or modified. A large volume of data that is frequently updated can cause backup problems. For each data change, Datto SaaS Protection makes an API call to the service and the update is added to the backup. This repeats until all data updates are captured and added to the backup.

However, when the number of API calls exceeds the limit, the backup stops. Once the throttle has been lifted, the API call limit is reset and the backup continues. But it needs to catch up with any additional changes that have been made. This can create a loop where the limit is hit again, the backup stops, the limit is reset and so on.

If the rate of change is exceeding the rate of ingest due to large amounts of data traffic occurring daily, a backup can get stuck in a loop.

Tips

  • Only files involved in a collaboration process should be stored in SharePoint and Teams.
  • Avoid nesting folders and files when possible.
  • Files that need to be accessed over HTTP or HTTPS should be stored in SharePoint and Teams.
  • Files that need to be managed in a document management system should be stored in SharePoint and Teams.
  • SharePoint handles documents most effectively that are a maximum of 300 MB. Larger files should be stored in a file server.
  • A local network connection to a local file server is much faster than an internet connection to a cloud service.
  • Avoid integrating applications that automatically generate or update a large number of files on a regular basis, e.g. Microsoft Power Automate.

Resources

For more information, see the following: