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User tips: How to stop SharePoint backup woes

13.02.2007
Apparently my recent column (see "") discussing backup challenges related to Microsoft SharePoint resonated with a significant number of Computerworld readers, who enthusiastically responded with their experiences dealing with this issue. While the range of solutions for dealing with SharePoint backups varied, one common thread among the respondents was that they had not anticipated that backup would prove to be such an issue.

Here's a brief summary of the challenge at hand: a typical SharePoint environment is distributed across a farm made up of multiple servers, including front-end Web servers, index or query servers, application servers and SQL database servers. While actual content is stored in the various databases, other information such as IIS configuration metabases, application-specific configuration data and farm configuration databases can reside in a several different locations. A large corporation will likely have multiple farms, so the challenge of ensuring application recoverability can become complex rather quickly.

An approach that proved to be effective for one reader was implementing SharePoint servers on virtual machines and to perform regular VSS snapshots, later backing them up offline. Back-end SQL databases continue to reside on physical servers and are backed up in a two-stage fashion, first to disk with native SQL tools and then to tape with their backup application. However, it's likely that the use of virtualized servers and various snapshot techniques will become common in SharePoint environments.

Limiting data growth on a single server was also cited by several people as a generally recognized best practice. One example: SharePoint application servers are limited to 5GB each and databases to 50GB. Keep in mind that these limits will likely increase with SharePoint 2007, but I'd avoid allowing them to get too large as recovery time might suffer.

Several readers related their successful experiences with third-party backup products, such as CommVault Systems Inc. and AvePoint Inc. I should add that Symantec's Backup Exec also offers a SharePoint agent that supports individual object restore.

While most respondents are using current versions, some have been experimenting with beta versions of the Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007. A major recovery enhancement with 2007 is a two-stage (user- and site-level) recycle bin. Many respondents are hoping that this, in conjunction with SharePoint's versioning capabilities, will significantly reduce the volume of restore requests because of accidental deletions. For more details, I'd suggest the newly published Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Administrator's Companion by Bill English.