| After defining your backup strategy, you will naturally be able to determine how you will restore this data when needed. The restoration process will heavily rely on the success of the backup strategy. Therefore, it is important to understand exactly how it is managed. It is important to understand that an individual workspace or document cannot be restored. The restore process can be executed from a remote disk or a disk on the same server. When restoring a SharePoint Portal Server, you must take into account that the server is required to be offline. Therefore, your acceptable server downtime and business operations should be considered before you execute this procedure. During the restoration process, all of the SharePoint Portal Server data is eliminated. This data is also inaccessible, and there is a chance the server may not be accessed if the process fails. CAUTION If the password used to create the backup image is lost, the restoration will be successful but the passwords for the content source account will be invalid. Therefore, crawls of the content source may be subject to authentication failure.
Before Restoring the Server All backup solutions require a certain amount of pre-check activities to occur. Before the backup process begins, you must check the following: -
Sufficient disk space on target restore source. -
Ensure that disk space is on an NTFS (file system) partition. -
Validate that SharePoint Portal Server is installed. -
Validate Web Storage version. You must ensure that the Web Storage versions are the same on the target server and the backup image. NOTE There may be an instance where the Web Storage System was installed by another application, like Exchange 2000. In this case, the target server for the restore must be on an Exchange 2000 server with the same version.
CAUTION The Restore will fail if the Web Storage Versions are different.
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Local Administrative Permissions. Ensure that you have local administrative rights on the target restore server. -
Restore data from tape. If the image was saved to tape, use the same utility to restore it before running the SharePoint Portal Server restore procedure. -
Remote Disk Access. When backing up to a remote location, you must have a sufficient network access account that includes local administrator rights on that server and write access on that remote disk. CAUTION Be sure that you maintain consistency with service Packs on your SPS when using the SPS restore feature. The restore will fail if you are restoring data from a server with different SPS Service Pack versions.
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