First steps

This page walks through the four things you will actually do as an end user, in the order you do them: find something, look at it, restore it, or download it. Everything here works on your own mailbox, IMAP account and OneDrive only.

Find a mail or file in a backup

Open Restore in the navigation. You work through three choices, top to bottom:

Mailbox or drive — which of your own accounts to look in. If your organization protects more than one of your accounts (for example a mailbox and a OneDrive), each is listed, marked Yours.
Point in time — which backup to browse, listed as “Backup #number from date”, newest first, each with its item count, size, and whether a restore check has already proven it can be read back. Osiris keeps several points in time, not just the latest one, so you can go back to before a specific change if you need to.
Browse or search — once a point in time is chosen, its folders open in a tree on the left with a list of entries on the right, exactly as that mailbox or drive looked at that moment. Use Search this backup to jump straight to something instead of clicking through folders; it matches names, paths and mail subjects at that point in time (not the text inside a message body or file).

Selecting a mail or file shows its version history below its details: how it looked across your different backups, so you can open, restore or download an earlier version specifically, not only the newest one.

Preview and print

Selecting an item today shows its details: for a mail, the subject, sender, recipients, date, and whether it has attachments, is read or flagged; for a file, its size, type, modified date and full path. This is enough to confirm you have the right item before you restore or download it, and before you confirm a restore, Osiris lists exactly what you are about to restore — how many items and, for a handful, their names — as a last check.

Two things are not available yet:

Reading the actual content — the message body of a mail, or a preview of a file — before restoring or downloading it. Right now you see its details, not its content.
A print view. There is currently no printable version of a restored item or a restore confirmation anywhere in Osiris.

Both are planned; this page will be updated the moment either ships.

Restore

Select what you want back (a single mail, a file, a folder, or an entire mailbox/OneDrive at that point in time) and choose Restore…. You then choose where it goes:

Original location (the default) — back into the account it came from.
Another account — only offered to tenant administrators, for example to restore into a stand-in mailbox.
Download as ZIP — see Download below.

Restore in Osiris is built to be non-destructive: by default it keeps restored items alongside whatever is already in your mailbox or OneDrive rather than replacing or deleting anything — mail is restored into a new, clearly named folder (for example “Restored 2026-09-23 1432”), so it never mixes back into your existing folders unannounced; a OneDrive file that would collide with one already there is restored under a new name instead of overwriting it. (The current beta still has a separate “Replace” option behind a warning for mail and OneDrive restores; removing it entirely is in progress, and until it ships, choosing it is the one way a restore could still overwrite something.) Restoring your own data needs no justification beyond picking what you want; you only have to give a reason when an administrator restores something on your behalf.

An older version that OneDrive itself kept (separate from Osiris’s own backups) can only be downloaded, not restored back in place.

Every restore you start is queued as a job you can follow on the Restore jobs page: its progress while it runs, and afterwards exactly what was restored, skipped, or failed, when it was requested, and by whom — your own record of the restore, kept for as long as your organization keeps its audit log.

Download

Instead of restoring into a mailbox or OneDrive, choose Download as ZIP: mail comes out as individual .eml files (openable in any mail client), other files as they are, together with a checksum list so you can verify nothing changed in transit. The download link stays valid for 24 hours; if you navigate away, you can get back to it from the Restore jobs page, where the same request shows a Download ZIP action until it expires.

Once you have restored or downloaded what you needed, see Usage for what else Osiris does for you day to day, including what is still being built.