Backing up your Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE) environment is critical for data protection, compliance, and disaster recovery. The Power Platform Admin Center provides an easy interface to take manual backups, manage automatic backups, and restore environments. This article explains the complete process , including what’s included in backups, where to check history, and best practices.

1. Types of Backups

• Automatic Backups: Created every 12 hours, retained for 7 days (default; extended in Managed Environments).
• Manual Backups: Created on-demand, retained for 28 days.

2. What’s Included in the Backup?

• Dataverse database (tables, records, metadata).
• Customizations (forms, views, plugins, workflows, Power Automate flows).
• Security roles, field security profiles, teams, and user access settings.
• Portal configuration (Power Pages) — if linked to the environment.

Note: Some items like external file storage (SharePoint, Azure Blob) are not included; back them up separately.

3. How to Take a Manual Backup

1. Go to Power Platform Admin Center.
2. Select Environments from the left menu.
3. Choose your Dynamics 365 CE environment.
4. Click on Backups in the command bar.
5. Click + New backup.
6. Enter a name and optional notes for the backup.
7. Click Create.

4. Viewing Backup History

To check your backup history:

• Open the Backups tab for your environment.
• You’ll see both manual and automatic backups with their creation time, type, and expiry date.
• You can filter or search backups using the provided controls.

5. Restoring from a Backup

1. In Power Platform Admin Center, go to Environments.
2. Select the environment you want to restore to.
3. Click Restore and pick a backup from the list.
4. Choose overwrite current environment or restore to a new environment.
5. Confirm and wait for the restore to complete.

Warning: Restoring will overwrite current data if you choose the overwrite option.

6. Backup Retention & Limits

• Automatic backups: 7 days (default) or longer in Managed Environments.
• Manual backups: 28 days.
• No export to on-premise allowed directly; use data export or replication for external archiving.

7. Best Practices

• Schedule manual backups before major deployments or data imports.
• Document backup names and notes for easier identification.
• Keep an external export of critical data and configurations.
• Use Managed Environments if you need longer retention or policies.