Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 28: Disaster Recovery in SharePoint Products and Technologies 773
in SharePoint Products and Technologies, the SQL Server backup tools provide an
important advantage compared to the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Data Backup
and Restore utility.
With the SQL Server backup tools, you can get a full-fidelity, complete backup
of the databases used by SharePoint Products and Technologies. You can restore
any or all of these databases. In a scenario where portal databases are backed up
using the SQL Server backup tools, you need to remember that the index is not
restored. You can restore the portal site via the SharePoint Portal Server Central
Administration page after you have restored the portal databases by using the SQL
Server backup tools. For this scenario to work, the spsadmin service account must
either be a member of the Administrator’s group on the Web front-end server or be a
Windows SharePoint Services administrator. According to recommended security
practices, you should not grant the spsadmin account administrator rights; on the
server, the spsadmin account should be granted as few privileges as possible. By
default, the content access account is granted Windows SharePoint Services administrator
rights. You should create a new Windows security group, and add both the
content access account and the spsadmin service account to this group. Then, using
the Windows SharePoint Services administration Web pages, you should change the
Windows SharePoint Services administrator account to be this Windows security
group. From Windows SharePoint Services Central Administration, locate the Security
Configuration section and click Set SharePoint administration group. You must
have installed the SQL Server 2000 client tools to be able to use the SQL Server
backup tools or use the OSQL command-line tools that are installed with the Windows
Microsoft Data Engine. Both kinds of tools provide you with the possibility to
perform differential backups of the relevant databases.
A differential backup backs up the parts of the database that have changed
since the last full database backup. It also backs up any activity that took place during
the differential backup, as well as any uncommitted transactions in the transaction
log. Performing a differential backup minimizes the time that is necessary for
backing up a frequently modified database.
Note Perform a differential backup only if you have performed a full database
backup. Remember that you don’t back up the configuration database.
Windows SharePoint Services uses two types of databases: content databases
and configuration databases. Data in the lists and libraries on SharePoint sites go
into the content database. The virtual server settings, such as the mapping of a site
URL to the physical storage location, go into the configuration database. SharePoint
Portal Server uses two additional types of databases: the profile database and the services
database. User profiles are stored in the profile database. Services information,
such as gatherer logs and subscription schedules, goes into the services database.