October 07, 2009

Don't be caught without a SharePoint recovery solution

Having a solid data protection plan for SharePoint is an absolute must. Here's how to put one in place

SharePoint is being deployed in more organizations each year. In fact, it has become for many companies a mission-critical solution because it provides such capabilities as wiki, blog, document library, photo gallery, and more, thus comprising a collaboration hot spot.

The amount of SharePoint data grows incredibly fast because additions come not from a single person but rather, from members of your workgroups. Announcements, links, documents, tasks -- they stream into the server from everyone in the organization with contribution permissions. Like Public Folders for Exchange, SharePoint has become a dumping ground for all sorts of content. And it must be protected.

Backing up SharePoint is not difficult. But restoring it is.

[ Read the InfoWorld Test Center's review of SharePoint Server 2007. And get an early look at SharePoint 2010. ]

Behind the scenes, SharePoint is composed of IIS (Internet Information Server) configurations and a set of SQL databases: Farm Configuration, Administrator Content, Shared Service Providers Configuration, Search, Web Application Content, and more. All the information on the SharePoint site resides in those databases.

SharePoint has a built-in backup utility, but it has limitations, especially around recovery. Before I explain how to deal with those limitations, let's consider the levels of data recovery you want to prepare for: content, site, and disaster.

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tomaddox 7-Oct-09 9:38am

"Instead, the company's IT staff resolved to forget the whole thing and not use SharePoint any longer. Can you imagine such a case in your environment?"

Imagine it? I dream about it! Visualize a world without SharePoint . . . ah, you just took me to my happy place.
kapman78 7-Oct-09 1:27pm
After so many customizations to sharepoint we decided to use Symantec System Recovery on both the front and back end. We have snapshots scheduled every night. All those snapshots are backup to tape using Backup Exec. With Sym Sys Recovery you can restore to any hardware, it's platform independent.
Anony206 8-Oct-09 10:57am
I hate to point out that this is a horrid article, and if I was looking at Sharepoint to do something for me, based on reading this I would look elsewhere. A Google/Yahoo/Bing search for "Sharepoint backup" gives more options and ideas than the author puts into this article. Since Sharepoint is the rising star of the MS products, it would be worth the time for Infoworld to do a full comparison of different solutions. Nothing against SC DPM - but if you can't do a live full backup of all data needed to do a DR test or restore, it doesn't fit the requirements. With no pricing or concepts of how they are implemented, this article is more damaging than useful.
NickD 12-Oct-09 4:08pm
I used Avepoint's solution for data protection. It was pretty intuitive to do too...pretty flexible and easy to operate. We were able to backup our entire sharepoint environment. We worked mostly with the office in san jose, they were helpful. I initially called about migration, but found we needed to have a granular dp system.

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