Chapter 14: Backup and Restore


Overview

By now I am sure you agree that SharePoint 2007 is a great product and a fantastic tool for managing information for your organization, regardless of what type of tasks or activities you may have. When a SharePoint project goes from being a test installation into a production environment, it will suddenly contain important information that constantly grows every day. Sooner than you might expect, SharePoint will be a mission-critical application in your environment. How can you protect it? By making backups, of course! As the old SharePoint geek joke goes: "What do you call a SharePoint administrator who does not make backups?" The answer: "Unemployed!"

This chapter tells you how to keep your job as a SharePoint administrator. It starts by describing what information you need to protect and then lists all available options. You will learn how to perform backup and restore procedures. You will also read about other options, such as MS SQL backups and third-party backup tools.

Just remember this: If you do not regularly verify that your backup solution works (that it actually is possible to actually restore data), you can save a lot of time and effort by skipping the backup process completely; the result will be the same. During my 29 years in the computer business, I have seen a large number of backup solutions that do not work when you actually need them! A lot of IT administrators seem to think that it is enough to get some sort of backup solution, manage to get it running (at least one time), and then just relax and be happy. In my experience as a consultant hired by customers to help them deal with disasters, the number of restore failures is close to 50 percent, for many reasons, such as wrongly configured backup procedures, hardware problems, and media problems. Please make sure you don't join this group. Restore the data and make sure that you can read it; you will be surprised how often it will fail the first time you try to restore it. By performing these fire drills regularly, you and your team will gain experience in how to perform a quick restore that actually works; this will help you all sleep better at night, and it will help you retain your jobs.



Beginning SharePoint 2007 Administration. Windows SharePoint Services 3 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Software Testing Fundamentals: Methods and Metrics
ISBN: 047143020X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 119

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net