I am doing some business continuity planning and have a couple of questions. I know that our SharePoint Online site collections are backed up every 12 hours and that backups are kept for 14 days. If we are planning to make a change to a site collection containing forms, SharePoint Designer workflows, and Site Columns and Content Types, is there a way to use this support service to request a special site collection backup before we start? Alternatively is there a way to do an local backup of the information before we start making changes? If it is not currently available can you provide a general idea of the timeline / roadmap of when this would be available? Thank you.”

It's impossible to see the full document name of most of the deleted items that I have in the Site Collection Recycle Bin. I thought I would be able to just expand the columns to get that information - but nothing is allowed.

There are lots of documents that start with the same first part of the name - and what will identify the document that needs to be restored is in the part that isn't displayed. There seems to be no way to view the full name.

There is no way to edit the view to give more details to help identify what each document is.

There should be an easier way to see this information as the limitation of how much is displayed of the name is not realistic. The answer to restore all of these is also not useful.

Now that we have the ability to restore a Library back to any point in time within the last 30 days it would be great to have the ability to select specific dates and times with which to restore. Currently if you're wanting to restore a specific bulk-change in a document library without affecting other folders that may have been edited with changes you want to keep, you have to take a backup up the data you know you want to keep, restore back to that point in time, and then restore the files you didn't want to make changes to. Having the ability to select a specific time and date for both the restore point and the point you want to restore up to would be incredibly beneficial.

The issue with databases that live in an Always-On Availability Group is that they can’t be “Altered”. The patching script is trying to alter the database and set the log to simple. This causes an error. The work around is below but causes us to add extra steps to the patching process. Can you find a way to patch and stop alter the database log method?

Fix:
So the solution for this particular problem scenario is to remove the Usage Logging database from the Availability Group while you are patching. You can do this safely, assuming that you have all your service applications configured to point to the availability group listener so that you can continue to access the databases while patching. The other important points are that you must remove the database from the primary replica and that you make a backup of the primary replica just in case something goes wrong. Once your patching has been successful across all nodes in the farm, you must then re-add the Usage Logging database back to the Availability Group.