Sharepoint 2010 : Backup and Restore Options (part 1) - Central Administration Backup and Restore Tool

1. Disaster Recovery Planning

When creating a disaster recovery (DR) plan, you need to determine what you are trying to recover from. In other words, think of your disaster recovery plan like “taking out insurance” for your SharePoint environment. There are various levels of protection you may wish to set in place. You may be using a DR plan to create a replica copy of your environment to recover specific content (like the deletion of a site), or you may wish to create a plan to create a new environment from scratch (in the event of an actual disaster) that will quickly and effectively replicate the current environment.

For example, on one end of the spectrum, you could make things easy on your IT team and back up your data once every six months or so, but then you run the risk of losing a lot of data if something were to happen (a hard drive crashes, administrator or user error, and so on). On the other end of the spectrum, you can do a full backup of everything daily (or even more frequently—say hourly) to ensure that you always have the latest of everything—but does that make sense for your environment? You might ask, “Why would we not do that?” The challenge with effective disaster recovery planning is balancing the cost (actual dollars as well as resource time) against the protection required that makes the most sense (in the short and long term).

To properly capture these types of decisions, we recommend creating a disaster recovery operations document.

Creating a Disaster Recovery (DR) Operations Document

The following is a framework for a SharePoint disaster recovery operations document. It is important to note that a DR plan is only effective if it is both complete and accurate.

An effective SharePoint disaster recovery plan should contain full documentation on how to re-create an entire SharePoint environment from scratch. This requires a process (and discipline) that is accurate and well-maintained. Each and every time a SharePoint element (for example, a Web Part, xml file, configuration setting, and so on) is altered or added, the disaster recovery inventory document must be updated.

Here’s an example of information that should be captured:

When you’ve got a document underway, you’ll want to start filling in your company-specific recovery steps, including your SharePoint backup and restore steps. To determine your specific steps, you’ll need to decide on which SharePoint backup/restore option best suits your needs. Let’s take a look at the various SharePoint options.

2. Backup and Restore Options

There are several backup and restore options in SharePoint Server 2010, including:

• SharePoint Central Administration backup and restore

• PowerShell cmdlets command-line backup and restore

• Two-stage Recycle Bin restore

• SQL Server database backup and restore

The first two options (SharePoint Central Administration and PowerShare cmdlets) provide out-of-the-box tools to back up a full farm.

The two-stage Recycle Bin is a tool used to recover individual files. It is not designed to support full-site or Site Collection recovery.

The SQL Server’s backup and restore utilities are available only if you have a full version of SQL Server. SQL Express does not include a GUI for backup, but you can write a script to automate the backup.

Each of these options provides a different level of recoverability and usability—we discuss the options in the following sections, including when to use each.

2.1 Central Administration Backup and Restore Tool

For those familiar with the backup/restore functionality in SharePoint Office Server 2007, one of the first things you will notice is that the Data Backup and Restore interface in SharePoint Server 2010 is much more robust in terms of the granularity of backup that can be enacted.

The Backup and Restore tools are still contained within SharePoint Central Administration. In the interface (see Figure 1), there is a link on the left for Backup and Restore.

Figure 1. The Backup and Restore link, located on the left-side navigation within Central Administration, enables you to perform full and differential backups of your SharePoint farm

The main features of the Backup and Restore tool within SharePoint Central Administration include

• The ability to select specific farm components for backup. This includes the selection of an entire farm or specific components within a farm such as the configuration database, Web application setup, content databases, service applications, and user profiles.

• An improved interface for managing backups and restores. The interface is well-organized with clear instructions on expected parameters and intended outcome.

• The ability to do full or differential backups. Full backup backs up the selected content with full history. A differential backup backs up all changes to the selected content since the last full backup.

• The ability to restore a site or list.

• Backup process statistics.

The Backup and Restore tool also provides information about overall disk space usage, status, and errors.