365 Backup · Microsoft Planner

The plan is gone.And with itwho was doing what.

A plan deleted on its own cannot be pulled back out of any recycle bin at Microsoft. Conbool captures plans including buckets, tasks, assignments and checklists on a schedule, and brings back individual tasks too.

Why Planner is a question of its own

Four points that count when something is lost.

No recycle bin for a single plan

Delete a plan and there is nowhere to pull it back from. Only when the whole group is deleted does the plan hang on the group's retention and return with it.

A task goes faster than a plan

The more common case is not the lost plan but the accidentally deleted task, with its description, its checklist and the name of the person responsible.

The substance sits in the details

Title and due date are the least of it. Description, checklist, attachment references, labels and assignments carry the actual work, and those are exactly what a manual export leaves behind.

Tidying up looks like normal operation

Someone closing a plan and clearing it away does nothing unusual as far as the platform is concerned. There is no warning and no confirmation prompt.

Spring product launchState from last night
Open
Agree the price list
Collect trade fair dates
In progress
Rework the data sheet
Training for the sales team
Done
Naming decided
Budget approved
Rework the data sheet restored, with checklist and assignee

Identifiers, authors and ordering are assigned anew by Microsoft on creation. The restore report says so.

Task level

One task back, not the whole plan.

A backed up state shows the buckets of a plan with their tasks. You tick what is missing, and exactly that comes back, along with its description, checklist and assignment.

Buckets are recreated under their names

Assignments, checklists and labels come along

Target group is yours to pick, optionally a new title

Whatever Microsoft assigns anew is in the report

How the backup runs

On the same schedule as every other source, with no separate tool.

1. Find the plans

Conbool walks the groups of your tenant and takes every plan it finds as a protection unit of its own. New plans join with the next inventory run.

2. Read it in full

Every run reads the plan, the plan details, the buckets, the tasks and the task details. Label names sit on the plan and are read along with it, otherwise a coloured label would be left as a bare number.

3. Bring back what is missing

A single task or the whole plan, into the original group or into another one. Optionally as a new plan under a title you choose.

What makes the Planner backup

Six points that make the difference.

Buckets and tasks in their structure

A plan is not captured as a flat task list but with its buckets. On restore they are created again, and each task lands in the bucket it was in.

Assignments, checklists, labels

Who was responsible, what is still open and which labels were set belong to the task and are captured with it, along with the description and attachment references.

Individual tasks instead of whole plans

You pick exactly the tasks that are missing out of a backed up state. A full copy of the plan sitting next to the original is rarely what anyone needs.

Target group is yours to choose

A restored plan belongs to a Microsoft 365 group. That can be the original one or another, for instance when the team has since been cut differently.

The losses are part of the result

Identifiers, authors, timestamps, comments and the ordering are assigned anew by Microsoft on creation. That is in the restore report, not in a footnote.

On the same schedule

Planner runs with every other source in one control surface. An interval per source can be set, and failures and runs appear in the same overview.

With and without a backup of your own

What is possible either way.

 
With Conbool
Microsoft 365 only
Restore a plan deleted on its own
yes
no
Restore a single deleted task
yes
no
Keep checklists and assignments
yes
only while the task exists
Look at a state from several weeks ago
yes
no
Write back into a different group
yes
no

Statements about Microsoft 365 follow its publicly documented recovery features. Plans deleted along with their group return with the group while its retention period lasts.

Frequently asked questions

Does Microsoft not bring a deleted plan back by itself?
Only indirectly. If the Microsoft 365 group is deleted, it sits in the directory recycle bin for a limited time, and the plan with it. If the plan itself is deleted, there is nowhere to pull it back from.
Can a single task be restored?
Yes. The tasks in a backed up state are listed with title, bucket and due date. You tick what should come back, and the rest is left untouched.
Does the plan land where it was?
A plan always belongs to a Microsoft 365 group. You choose the original group or another one. Writing back into an existing plan requires an explicit confirmation, because unlike a new plan it cannot be undone by deleting it.
What does not come along on a restore?
Microsoft assigns new identifiers to plan, bucket and task, so an old link points nowhere afterwards. Author and timestamps are set by the platform from the caller, so they name the restoring person and today's date. Comments live as a conversation in the group mailbox and cannot be written back through the Planner interface. The ordering inside a bucket is created afresh. All of it is stated in the restore report.
Does Conbool need extra permissions for this?
Reading plans requires the tasks permission in your tenant. Without it the run reports the plans explicitly as unreadable, instead of recording an empty backup as a success. The other sources carry on unaffected.
Does a plan count against our seat allowance?
No. Seats are counted per licensed Microsoft account, not per protected unit. A plan belongs to no individual user and therefore takes no seat of its own, and neither does a team, a SharePoint site or the Entra directory. A seat is taken by anyone holding a Microsoft licence with Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive or Teams; their mailbox, online archive, personal file storage and chat history all run under that one seat. Which units are protected is shown under protection scope.
Can a plan be handed out as a file?
No. For plans there is restore into Microsoft, not a file export. Anyone who needs a history as a document will find that for Teams channels and chats.
Are all plans really found?
Every plan attached to a Microsoft 365 group, which is the normal case. Two kinds stay out and are reported rather than hidden: plans in a roster, meaning a loose participant list without a group, are only reachable through the Microsoft preview interface at all, and we do not build a backup on that. Premium plans, formerly Project for the Web, are not reachable through the Planner interface at all. A run report names what was skipped and why.

Related solutions

Restore a plan against your own data

We connect a test tenant and bring a task back together with you, before you decide.