During a Microsoft 365 outage, your users work in Google Workspace and their new mail exists only there. Recovery Sync moves that mail back to Microsoft 365 once the outage is over, so your primary environment ends up with a complete record of everything that happened. This article explains how recovery works and what to expect.
What Recovery Sync does
A recovery runs in the opposite direction to your normal sync. Instead of copying mail from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace, it reads the mail your users sent and received in Google Workspace and writes it back to their Microsoft 365 mailboxes.
- Messages are placed into the correct folders in Microsoft 365, and folders that do not exist yet are created automatically
- Items that already exist in Microsoft 365 are never duplicated, no matter how many times a recovery runs
- Nothing is removed or modified in Google Workspace — recovery only copies data back
- Your normal Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace sync is not paused — it continues to run alongside the recovery
Recovery covers mail
Recovery Sync currently recovers mail. It is started by an administrator from the Recovery page — it does not run automatically.
The Recovery page
Recovery is managed from the Recovery page in the CloudM Continuity sidebar. From here you start recoveries, follow their progress, review the outcome for every user, and see a history of past recoveries with their date, time, status and summary.
The recovery lifecycle
| Stage | What happens |
|---|---|
| Start | You choose a recovery start date and confirm. All mail synced from that day onward is recovered for every eligible user — users with an active policy and a completed initial sync. |
| Processing | The recovery works through each user. You see items synced counts as it progresses, updated every few minutes. |
| Completed | A summary shows the outcome for every user: recovered successfully, completed with warnings, or failed. |
| Finish | Once you have reviewed the outcome (and retried if needed), you finish the recovery, which moves it to the historic recoveries list. A recovery must be finished before a new one can start. |
Retrying a recovery
If a recovery fails or completes with warnings, you can retry it from the summary. A retry re-runs the recovery for all users included in it, not just the ones that failed. This is deliberate: it makes sure any mail that arrived in Google Workspace after the original run is also recovered. Because items already in Microsoft 365 are never duplicated, re-running is always safe.
A recovery where every user succeeded cannot be retried — there is nothing left to do. Finish it and, if you need to recover again later, start a new recovery. Retrying creates a new recovery run and moves the original to the historic recoveries list, so your history is kept.
Understanding the items synced count
The items synced count shows the number of items processed from Google Workspace, and it accumulates across recovery runs. Because a retry re-runs every user, the count after a retry includes items that were already recovered, so it can be higher than the number of new items. This is expected, and it does not mean anything was duplicated in Microsoft 365.
If something fails
When a user fails to recover, their status shows as failed in the summary. A specific failure reason is not shown for individual users. Common causes are connection problems with Microsoft 365 or a revoked sign-in token for the user (for example, after their Google Workspace password was changed). If a recovery keeps failing for the same user, see Troubleshooting sync failures.
If a recovery is interrupted, the items recovered before it stopped are kept — the summary shows how far it got, and you can re-run the recovery to continue.
Next steps
- Starting a recovery — When and how to start
- After a recovery — Reviewing results, retrying and finishing