Third-Party Backup Tools | Software Testing Fundamentals: Methods and Metrics

There are alternatives for the backup tools that come with SharePoint; both specific SharePoint backup utilities, and SharePoint agents for general backup applications. They will often make it easier to do backups and in some cases make it possible to restore things that SharePoint cannot do, such as restoring a specific version of a document.

The purpose of this section is to give you a general overview of these third-party tools to make you aware that they exist and how they can be an alternative to SharePoint's own tools. This is not a complete list of everything that is available, so please do not get upset if I don't mention your favorite tool. As of this writing, only the backup tools from AvePoint are available for SharePoint 2007, but the other tools will most likely be released sometime during 2007, so they are mentioned here as well.

General Backup Agents

Practically all popular backup applications available today know how to back up SharePoint sites besides the file system, MS Exchange, and other applications. Mostly you will need to purchase a special "SharePoint 2007 Agent" to enable these applications to back up and restore SharePoint information. Below is a table with the most common backup tools and their SharePoint add-ons.

Open table as spreadsheet

Backup Program	SharePoint Add-On	Comment
Veritas BackupExec	For WSS and MOSS 2007	Can restore single items, sites, site collections, and portal sites.
Veritas NetBackup	For WSS and MOSS 2007	Can restore single sites, site collections, and portal sites.
Commvaults Galaxy	For WSS and MOSS 2007	Can restore sites, site collections, portal sites, and individual documents.
Brightstore ArcServe	For WSS and MOSS 2007	Can restore sites, site collections, and portal sites.

Note that there are only two of these general backup products that allow you to restore individual documents, but no version history, web discussions, or lists or list items. To get this type of functionality, you need to look at backup tools specifically designed for SharePoint, such as DocAve.

MS SQL Backup Tools

Since SharePoint uses MS SQL for data storage, it is only natural to think about using the standard backup tools for MS SQL for SharePoint backups as well. And this is definitely true; you can use these SQL tools for SharePoint data. But there are some things you need to be aware of:

q Both MS SQL 2000 Server and SQL 2005 Server come with backup tools, but not MS SQL Server 2005 Express Edition; if you use this, you will therefore need a special tool for backups of SharePoint databases.
q When using SQL backup tools, you must restore a complete database in case of data loss. In other words, you cannot restore a single site or site collection. Only a complete restore is possible with these tools.
q SQL backup tools do not back up files on the SharePoint server, such as the Search and Index files; you will still need to use another backup tool as a complement.
q When using SharePoint's standard tools for backups you don't need to use SQL backup tools. All SharePoint data in the SQL database will be secured by SharePoint's own tool. And it works for MS SQL Express databases, too.

It is easy to resolve the first issue above: There are several excellent tools on the market that can be used for backing up MS SQL Server 2005 Express Edition databases, such as Simego's SQL Admin Studio (http://simego.co.uk).

The remaining issues in the previous list are harder to resolve. I recommend that you combine any SQL- based backup tool with one or more of the SharePoint tools, such as STSADM, to make it possible to restore single items, lists, or sites when necessary. Today, hardware is most often very reliable and there is very seldom a disk crash. Almost all recovery situations are about restoring single documents, lists, or sometimes complete lists. And the SQL Backup tool will not help you with that. The biggest advantage with SQL backups is that it will back up all data in the SQL server, including SharePoint's databases. So, it is convenient when doing backups, but it is not the best solution when it is time for a restore.

AvePoint Tools

One of the first vendors that developed backup solutions specifically for SharePoint was AvePoint (http://www.avepoint.com). They were also first with a backup solution for SharePoint 2007 and with migration tools for moving content from SharePoint 2003 servers to SharePoint 2007. Their main product, DocAve, is today one of the most popular tools due to its very advanced restore options, and it is often recommended by Microsoft as the solution for organizations that require a way to recover single documents, including the complete version history. Note that DocAve by itself is not a substitute for a complete SharePoint backup. Its objective is to offer the administrator the capability to restore the following objects to their original location or to another SharePoint farm:

q Restore a single document, including all its previous versions and web discussions.
q Restore a specific version of a document instead of all versions.
q Restore a single list item.
q Restore a single list or library.
q Restore a single site.
q Restore a single personal site.
q Restore a single portal area.

The current version of DocAve is not backing up the complete SharePoint structure, so you will still need to use a tool like SharePoint Central Administration backups, a SQL backup tool, or DocAve's own SharePoint Disaster Recovery tool. However, since DocAve will protect all data, it will most likely be enough to run tools like MOSSBACKUP once per week or even once per month, depending on how often you change the structure of your SharePoint environment. The SharePoint Disaster Recovery tool will replicate the complete SharePoint environment to another server. If a total disaster happens, you simply rebuild the basic structure on the old server, and press the Recover button and all data will be replicated back to that server again.

There is also a very handy complement to DocAve called TrashBin, which allows a user to undelete any document, list item, or list directly from within the site, without any assistance from the administrator. TrashBin will use the backups made by DocAve, which gives the user the same type of restore options as the administrator (i.e., all the options listed above). Compare that to other "undelete" tools, which cannot restore documents deleted from the file system or by using the Explorer View. This is no problem for TrashBin.

NSE Tools

Another company that focuses on SharePoint backups is NSE (http://www.nse.com) with their product SPManager. It is also a complete backup solution for SharePoint 2003 environments. During 2007, NSE will release an upgraded version of SPManager that works with SharePoint 2007, both WSS and MOSS. It has been around for several years now and is easy to use for both backup and restore tasks. The main features of SPManager are these:

q Restores single documents.
q Restores single list items.
q Restores Web Parts.
q Restores single sites.
q Restores complete SharePoint environments.

All these restore operations can be performed against the original SharePoint server or on another SharePoint server. This tool can also be used as a migration tool or when you need to create a test environment of your production server.