Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Best Practices
Chapter 28: Disaster Recovery in SharePoint Products and Technologies 783
database corruption, or any other form of data loss. A well-planned and thoroughly
tested database recovery strategy and reliable database protection software are essential
to maintain the availability of SharePoint Products and Technologies solutions.
The first step in building a disaster recovery plan is to create a strategy to monitor
server health. You can rely on performance counters (which are discussed in
detail in Chapter 10, “Performance Monitoring in Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal
Server 2003”) and diagnostic logging to provide this information. Actively capturing
real-time event information is useful only if the responsible parties are proactively
monitoring server health and ready to act upon this information when necessary. If
problems arise, you should perform the following tasks:
■ Minimize the impact of the problem.
■ Perform a root-cause analysis to determine the exact nature of the problem.
■ Correct the problem.
■ Create a plan for providing a long-term solution and a reusable action plan
should the problem reoccur.
This section contains best practices that should be considered during the creation of
a disaster recovery plan.
Backup and Restore Strategy
To provide the most flexibility when restoring your customer’s data, use the Share-
Point Portal Server Data Backup and Restore utility in combination with using the
Stsadm.exe utility to back up the Windows SharePoint Services site collections and
My Sites. The backups should be made directly to a shared disk location and then
backed up to tape following your best practices.
Back Up Regularly Using Scripts
Create scripts using Stsadm.exe and Spsbackup.exe to back up all the databases and
indexes on a schedule. It is highly recommended that you perform backups when
server usage is low. Because most large companies have defined requirements on
mission-critical backups and restores, your schedule of backups will depend on
your customer’s requirements. You might need to back up more or less frequently if
your customer needs to meet a Service Level Agreement or has more stringent data
recovery standards in place.
The following code example uses the SharePoint Back And Restore tool to
back up a portal site. The code can be copied into a batch file.
"C:\Program Files\SharePoint Portal Server\BIN\spsbackup" /portal site
"http://woodgrove /file C:\\backup\MyPortal siteBackup.bak /overwrite