Teams private channels are implemented behind the scenes as a separate site collection in SharePoint. This means that for a single Microsoft Team there may be 1+n SharePoint Site Collections to store the File content, where n is the number of private channels in the Team.
The easiest way to determine where your content is stored is to use the "Open in SharePoint" link on the Files tab in Teams. This will open the specific Site Collection where your content is stored. In the screen shot below you can see:
- The Mark 8 Project Team has a private channel called Mark 8 – Private.
- Click Open in SharePoint.
- The browser should open to the exact location of the files in the separate private Site Collection. In this case titled Mark 8 Project Team – Mark 8 – Private. Note the URL. It is not the same as the parent Team. You will need this URL if you want to restore content for the Private Channel.
- Open Spanning Backup for Microsoft 365 and browse to the SharePoint tab.
- Browse or Search for the title of the Team site and notice that there is a Site Collection for the Team and a separate Site Collection for the Private Channel.
- Choose the Private Channel and click View Backups.
- Browse into Documents and locate the Private Channel folder, in this example, Mark 8 Private. At this point you can select and restore the content as you would any other SharePoint content.
Spanning Backup for Microsoft 365 protects your content no matter how you choose to collaborate. Microsoft Teams features enable you to collaborate in many ways that are not always obvious but the above instructions will help you locate the data you need within Spanning Backup for Microsoft 365.
Since Microsoft Team's integration as well as other SharePoint workflows can result in the dynamic creation of new sites as described above without IT oversight, we recommend using the "Automatically Backup New Site Collections" setting on the Manage Site Collections Tab to ensure Spanning is finding and protecting these new sites for you automatically.