Real World SharePoint® 2010: Indispensable Experiences from 22 MVPs

Chapter 6. Backing Up and Restoring SharePoint 2010

By Randy Williams

Welcome to backup and restore! For system deployments, and certainly not just SharePoint, this is the part of a project or operations task where most recognize its importance, but few do what is really necessary to protect the system. For SharePoint, this can be particularly dangerous, because it has quickly progressed into a mission-critical application for many organizations.

The good news is that Microsoft has made a number of backup-and-restore investments in SharePoint 2010. These investments cover nearly every aspect of those operations, including enhanced UI options, PowerShell scripting, complete backup of a farm's configuration, and, most importantly, numerous restore improvements. These investments are part of SharePoint Foundation 2010. So, whether you are running SharePoint Foundation 2010 or SharePoint Server 2010, they apply to you.

In this chapter, you learn about the following:

• Operation planning concepts

• What's new with backup and restore in SharePoint 2010

• Content recovery and disaster recovery

• Concepts and steps to perform each type of backup and restore

• How to apply concepts by studying different recovery scenarios

• Recommendations to further protect your SharePoint investment

OPERATIONS PLANNING

Many IT administrators do their jobs from the seat of their pants. Of course, don't interpret that statement literally — I mean quite the opposite, because they are usually busy reacting to the next emergency, ...