Professional SharePoint 2013 Administration

Chapter 9

Configuring SharePoint for High-Availability Backups

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Identifying business needs for disaster recovery
• Backing up and restoring SharePoint content and configuration
• Ensuring SharePoint’s resiliency against the unexpected

In the day-to-day business of IT, the unexpected can and does happen. To whatever extent possible, we need to anticipate the unexpected. Hardware will fail. Users will make mistakes. As an administrator, your job is to minimize the impact of these failures on your users, as well as yourself and your business. Planning is key to ensuring that when disaster strikes, your business can recover with an acceptable amount of service interruption.

Understanding what options are available out of the box is the first step to devising a plan and determining what is acceptable to your business. Every business situation is different, with different requirements and acceptable costs. For example, an internal SharePoint intranet farm for a small business doesn’t have quite the same uptime demands as a public-facing e-commerce SharePoint site selling decorative spoons with pictures of cats on them. This chapter covers the most common failure scenarios an enterprise is likely to face, along with the different out-of-the-box options available in SharePoint 2013 for proactively devising a strategy and recovering from them.

DETERMINING YOUR BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS

As a business, your first duty is to your customers. In an IT shop, your customers are ...