Frequently, I am asked to make changes to a customer’s environment. I’m a belt and suspenders kind of guy, so my backups have backups. At any rate, normally when I am performing changes in a tenant (or Exchange on-premises environment, for that matter), I make two sets of backups–one by piping a Get-cmdlet to Export-CSV (so I have a readable copy), and one by piping the same Get-cmdlet to Export-Clixml (so I have a way to set the nodes as parameters and import them back).
Read more at source: http://blogs.technet.com/b/undocumentedfeatures/archive/2016/03/01/using-xml-to-backup-and-restore-office-365-settings.aspx
