Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Technologies

218 10.8 Planning Backup and Restore

10.8 Planning Backup and Restore

Part of your overall deployment planning exercise should be considerations

for disaster recovery, especially since all of the out-of-the-box options

require a significant amount of storage space. The backup and restore plan is

not only important to prepare for disasters such as database corruption.

Most of the lost data is typically deleted by end users, albeit accidentally.

Luckily, WSS 3.0 now supports a multistage recycle bin, allowing both users

as well as site administrators to recover accidentally deleted files, thus effec-

tively removing 80 percent of typical restore operations in comparison to

previous version.

Unfortunately, we must plan for exceptional circumstances when plan-

ning our deployment architectures. What if there is a fire in the building

hosting the servers, and all of the servers are burned to the ground? Most

organizations require a business continuity plan for such exceptional circum-

stances continue operations as soon as possible in another location.

10.8.1 Out-of-the-Box Backup Options

Out-of-the-box SharePoint ships with tools for both products that allow

you to take online backups to disk of production portals and WSS site col-

lections. Of course, you can also use all of the disaster recovery options pro-

vided by SQL Server, except of course for SharePoint search indexes, which

are stored in another database engine. SharePoint 2007 has combined

backup and restore into the central administration backup tool accessible

from the web, thanks to feedback received from SharePoint 2003 users.

With the new Recycle Bin functionality provided by the core platform

in SharePoint 2007, the lack of granularity in the out of the box backup tools

is not such a big issue as it was in the previous version of SharePoint. How-

ever, Microsoft has still limited the central administration backup and restore

tool to only allow content database backup/restore at the lowest level. If you

wish to perform site or subsite level backup/restore, you will need to look

into one of the 3rd party products that provide further granularity. Alter-

nately, you could chose to not back up the index at all and accept an

increased recovery period for the search component as the content is being

re-indexed from scratch.

10.8.2 Third-Party Backup Solutions

Of course, there are a number of third-party solutions from various providers,

which offer per-site and even per-document back up/restore capabilities for a

cost. The first one to market in 2001 was AvePoint (www.avepoint.com), with

a product called Doc Ave that offered both site- and document-level