Overview of Backing Up and Restoring Sharepoint Data
Your Sharepoint portal can rapidly grow to include a large amount of data that makes up your shared business documents and automated business processes. To prevent losing your business data due to hardware failures, fires or natural disasters, it pays to have a solid disaster recovery< plan. Aside from the backup and restore of your content and business processes, your Sharepoint backup needs to include your configuration of the Sharepoint infrastructure. This includes backing up the servers that host Internet Information Server (IIS) and SQL Server, since these servers host most of the Sharepoint content.
Sharepoint includes tools to make Sharepoint backup and restore possible, the Central Administration application's user interface or a custom application that uses the SharePoint Services 3.0 backup and restore object model. There are several types of content that can be protected in your disaster recovery plan.
- Site collections, each of which can include multiple Web sites.
- Content databases, which may contain multiple site collections.
- Web applications, each containing multiple content databases.
- Content publishing Web services, which may contain multiple Web applications
- The whole SharePoint Services farm.
Limitations to Sharepoint Backup Restore
There are some limitations to what can be backed up and restored through Sharepoint backup and restore tools.
- You can't backup an individual Web site, list, or list item except by backing up the entire site collection to which it belongs.
- You can't back up a Sharepoint Services farm's configuration database unless you back up the whole farm.
- A Sharepoint Services Search index cannot be backed up incrementally. If a search index is included in an incremental backup, the index will get a full backup.
Backups of a given component can be either full or incremental. With an incremental backup, only parts of the component that have changed since the last full backup are backed up. Our consulting team draws on extensive Sharepoint consulting experience deploying Sharepoint for varied industries including Pharmaceuticals, Government, Finance, Manufacturing and Energy. Our dependable onsite Sharepoint consultants have delivered successful Sharepoint projects for organizations that range from medium sized businesses to Fortune 500 firms throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico and Europe.
The Unbounded Solutions consulting team can help you navigate the complexities of Sharepoint's backup and restore tools. We can also help you create a complete Disaster Recovery plan for your Sharepoint content and business processes.