11.3. Lesson 2: Back Up and Restore SharePoint

In Lesson 1, you saw how SharePoint supports highly available and scalable architectures with redundancy at all levels. If you have the budget to implement such a system you may feel reasonably secure and invulnerable to common problems. However, no amount of redundancy is a substitute for a strict backup and restore regime because disasters may occur at any time. Although such events are rare, the consequences may be very severe, especially in a modern knowledge-based company whose existence may be guaranteed only by the information it stores. For example, think of a software house: If the painstakingly developed source code for a flagship product is lost, it is difficult to see how the company can continue trading. Although this is often a thankless task, it is the IT administrator’s responsibility to ensure that your system can recover from even worst-case scenarios.

After this lesson, you will be able to: Describe typical situations in which the administrator must restore data. Understand the SharePoint Recycle Bin and its role in data protection. Back up a SharePoint farm in Central Administration. Perform granular backups in Central Administration. Restore data in Central Administration. Use Windows PowerShell cmdlets to script backup and restore operations. Use SQL Server tools to back up and restore SharePoint databases. Estimated Lesson Time: 60 minutes