What does "Extended restore" for Outlook mean?

Overview

Extended Restore restores Outlook email content and attachments while preserving additional original email metadata compared with Standard Restore. 

It is suitable for recovery scenarios where retaining more of the original characteristics of an email is important, such as compliance, investigation, or other fidelity-sensitive recovery scenarios.

What does Extended Restore preserve?

Extended Restore restores the email's primary content and attachments while retaining more of the original Microsoft Exchange metadata.

This can include:

• Language-related metadata - information associated with the language preferences or content language of the email.
• Microsoft Purview sensitivity-label metadata - underlying metadata associated with sensitivity labels applied to an email.
• Exchange message-tracking information - Microsoft Exchange-generated information used for message identification and tracing.
• Spam-classification metadata - information generated by Microsoft to classify messages for spam filtering.
• Content-formatting metadata - information related to the email's content type, character set, or MIME structure.
• Application-specific or custom metadata - additional email information created by applications, add-ins, or other mail systems.

 These are examples of metadata that may change or may not be preserved with Standard Restore but can be retained with Extended Restore. 

Before using Extended Restore

Extended Restore may require additional Microsoft 365 authorization before the restore can proceed.

How to provide authorization

A Microsoft 365 Global Administrator should:

1. Sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center.
2. Open Enterprise applications and select SysCloud.
3. Open Permissions / API permissions.
4. Grant admin consent for the permissions requested by SysCloud.
5. Return to SysCloud and retry the restore.

 If the additional authorization is not granted, Standard Restore can be used instead. 

Extended Restore may not be available in all Microsoft 365 environments. If it is not supported for an environment, the option appears disabled in the Restore window and Standard Restore remains available. 

 Standard Restore vs. Extended Restore