IT Info Magazine » SQL http://www.itinfomag.com Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:26:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.4 Backup considerations for Microsoft SharePoint http://www.itinfomag.com/data-backup-recovery/backup-considerations-for-microsoft-sharepoint/ http://www.itinfomag.com/data-backup-recovery/backup-considerations-for-microsoft-sharepoint/#comments Mon, 26 Jul 2010 11:27:53 +0000 George http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/?p=578 SharePoint is a content sharing and collaboration platform. It provides document sharing, team discussion and document-based workflow. SharePoint is highly customizable and each customization depends on the business environment. Although, there are loads of free templates from Microsoft that add further functionality to SharePoint, businesses can write their own code to add specific functionality related to their business needs. In addition, there are whole products that can be installed on top of SharePoint such as, Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Project Server 2007.

SharePoint requires that the backend database is Microsoft’s SQL Server. Worth noting, a couple of database limitations which are; SharePoint does not support a generic database interface, such as, Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) and you can encounter database size restrictions with previous versions of SQL server editions. Remember that the configuration and user data is all stored in the backend database. Considerations should be made whether to separate the backend database from the application platform as SharePoint is quite heavy on resources.

As the system grows its gets further customized and the need for an effective backup strategy becomes indispensible. I hope it is clear enough as to understand the importance of backing up your SharePoint environment. The Native backup solution is out of question! The major setbacks of this utility are its inexistent functionality of selecting different levels of items or folders for backup or restore operations. Without granularity of backup, an administrator needs to restore the whole database to be able to recover a deleted file. However, in the latest edition of SharePoint there is a Recycle bin where one can retrieve a deleted document.

To overcome such limitations, I suggest you invest in a third-party backup solution that at least provides the following functionality:

  1. Tight integration with Active Directory
  2. Data integrity – that is, no data is ignored during backups/restores such as, meta data
  3. Backup granularity and classification capabilities
  4. Has adequate scheduling capabilities

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