Hello,
Thank you for your question regarding the backup and restore process in Dynamics 365.
When restoring a production environment to a sandbox, there are a few important considerations from a licensing and storage perspective:
1. Storage Consumption
As you correctly noted, restoring a production environment to a sandbox will effectively double the storage usage, since both environments will contain a full copy of the data. This may impact your entitlement-based storage limits, and any excess usage could incur additional charges.
2. Licensing
There are no additional license requirements for performing a backup and restore operation between environments, provided both environments are within the same tenant and are covered under your existing Dynamics 365 subscription. Sandbox environments are included in most D365 plans, but the number and type of sandboxes available may vary depending on your licensing tier.
3. Data Compliance and Security
Ensure that restoring production data into a sandbox does not violate any data protection policies, especially if the sandbox is used for development or testing purposes. You may need to mask or anonymize sensitive data depending on your organization's compliance requirements.
4. Environment Type
Make sure the target environment is correctly set as a sandbox to avoid any unintended use of production-level features or integrations.
5. Automation and Integrations
After restoring, review and disable any automated workflows, integrations, or connectors that should not run in a sandbox environment to prevent unintended data processing or external communication.
If this response addresses your question, please consider marking it as accepted so it may assist others with similar concerns.
Best regards.
