Global search¶

Overview¶

Afi supports global search across all or a selected set of backups in Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure, and AWS tenants (data sources), enabling Afi administrators and operators to navigate across large backup datasets easily. This capability facilitates a wide range of e-discovery scenarios, including, but not limited to:

Locating and recovering a lost file with unknown ownership;
Identifying all resources where a copy of a file is stored;
Analyzing employee communication with advanced mail and chat data search capabilities, including time range, attachment, and sender/recipient search filters.

Afi search features and capabilities are explained in detail in the following articles:

Info

This feature is available for tenants added after May 6, 2023. To enable global search for tenants onboarded in Afi before May 6, 2023, please contact the Afi Support.

Supported workloads¶

Global search is supported for the following tenant kinds and workloads:

Google Workspace: emails, files and folders, contacts, calendar events, Google Chat messages, and Google Classroom content.
Microsoft 365: emails, OneDrive and SharePoint files and folders, Team Channel and Chat messages, contacts, calendar events, Exchange and Planner tasks, and Copilot user chats.
Microsoft Azure: files and folders in Azure Files, virtual machine, file share, and database configurations, and database schema scripts.
AWS: EC2 instance and database configurations, and PostgreSQL and SQL Server schema scripts.

To search inside Entra ID (Azure Active Directory), Power Platform, Google Directory, or Salesforce backups, please access the corresponding backups on the Service → Protection tab.

Microsoft 365¶

Google Workspace¶

Selecting search scope¶

By default, Afi searches the selected workload across all backups you can browse in the tenant. To narrow the search, open the In dropdown next to Search for.

The Resources tab lets you choose individual resources or a predefined scope, while Groups lets you choose resource groups. You can use one of these scope options at a time. Close the menu to apply your selection. To search all resources again, click × beside the selected scope to return to All resources.

Individual resources¶

To search specific backups, select one or more resources on the Resources tab. You can use Search resources to find them by name.

The available resources depend on the workload. In Google Workspace, Files & Folders lists users and shared drives. Email, contact, calendar, and chat searches list users, while Classroom searches list classes.

Resource group¶

To search backups belonging to one or more groups, select those groups on the Groups tab. You can use Search groups to find them by name. Available groups include:

Google groups and organizational units for Google Workspace;
Entra ID groups for Microsoft 365;
Azure resource groups for Microsoft Azure;
Dynamic resource groups created in Afi for Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Azure, and AWS.

Info

Selecting a Microsoft 365 group on the Groups tab searches its members' backups. To search the group's own mailbox, site, or Teams data, select the group on the Resources tab instead.

Predefined scopes¶

For certain workloads, Resources by kind on the Resources tab offers predefined search scopes. Each option includes all resources of one or more kinds. The available options depend on the workload.

For example, when searching for Files in Microsoft 365, you can either search across Users, shared mailboxes, rooms resources for OneDrive data or across Sites, Groups & Teams resources for SharePoint data.

Basic search mode¶

To start a search, choose a workload under Search for and the backups to search under In, or keep All resources to search across all backups you can browse in the tenant. Enter a query in the search box and press Enter to search across all text fields. To inspect matching items, select a backup in the results list.

This example finds emails containing both quarterly and review. The words don't need to appear together:

The next example searches files and folders for quarterly board:

To search specific fields, click Filter and select a field. Then choose an operator, such as contains or equals, and enter a value. You can add more conditions with Add filter. In basic search, an item must match every filter.

This example combines the From, Subject, and Received time filters to find emails from finance@demo.afi.ai with quarterly and review in the subject, received between June 1 and June 13, 2026:

Advanced search mode¶

Advanced search lets you combine filters with AND or OR and organize related filters into groups. To open it, click Filter, select a field, and turn on Advanced in the filter panel. The available fields depend on the workload.

By default, an item must match every filter (AND). To allow a match on any one filter (OR), click the group's AND button. To exclude results (NOT), choose doesn't contain or doesn't equal from a filter's operator dropdown.

This example finds emails with either quarterly or forecast in the subject:

The next example finds files with board in their names and excludes those with draft in their names:

Filter groups let you use AND and OR together. Each group has its own AND/OR setting, and you can place one group inside another.

This example finds files with board in their names in either PDF or PowerPoint format, excluding files with draft in their names. To build it:

Add Name contains board and Name doesn't contain draft to the main AND group.
Click Add filter group. Under an AND group, the new group uses OR by default.
Add Extension contains pdf and Extension contains pptx to the new group.

Afi displays your search query in a formal query language below the filters, so you can check it before searching. To view matching items, click Search and select a backup in the results list.

See AND, OR, and NOT expressions and nested filter groups for more examples.

Search and access permissions¶

Administrators and access group operators¶

Organization and tenant administrators as well as access group operators for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace tenants can search across all backups to which they have the browse access (see the Browse backup data permission).

When access scope for an access group operator is limited to a number of Entra ID (Azure Active Directory) groups or Google groups/Organizational units, they will be able to search across only the following backups which belong to these resource groups and these groups will be available for selection in the search scope dropdown.

Self-service users¶

When self-service access to SharePoint sites and Groups/Teams or Shared drives is enabled in a tenant, end-users in a tenant will be able to search across all backups in the tenant which they have access to.

For example, a user below (adele.vance) is a self-service user with access to three Microsoft 365 Groups (a Site Collection Administrator for the corresponding group sites) and can search across their own mailbox backup as well as the backups of these groups.

Search progress¶

Afi searches the selected backups and shows those with matching items on the left. Scroll down the list to continue searching and see more results.

The progress indicator above the list shows how many matching backups Afi has found and the percentage of backups scanned.

To see the number of scanned backups and the total number of backups in your scope, hover over the percentage.

Export from search results¶

You can download selected items from the search results or all items matching the provided search query on a per-backup basis, the same way as when searching across a single backup.

Restore from search results¶

You can restore selected items from the search results on a per-backup basis, the same way as when searching across a single backup.