SharePoint 2010 : Operations Management with the SharePoint Central Administration Tool (part 4) - Reviewing Backup and Restore Settings in SPCA

Reviewing Backup and Restore Settings in SPCA

The Backup and Restore page in SPCA, as shown in Figure 19, contains all relevant links that provide for integrated backup and restore functionality. This includes old options such as farm backup and restore, and new options such as granular backups.

Figure 19. Viewing the Backup and Restore page in SPCA.

Farm Backup and Restore

Within the first category on the Backup and Restore page, labeled Farm Backup and Restore, the following links are included:

• Perform a backup— Enables administrators to perform a full farm backup or a backup of individual components in a farm using the wizard shown in Figure 20. This can back up all components needed to restore a farm, including content databases and indexes.

  Figure 20. Backing up the farm using SPCA.

  

• Restore from a backup— Enables restores of the farm or farm components from the backups performed using the previous area of SPCA.

• Configure backup settings— Enables the number of backup and restore threads to be chosen and a default backup file location to be set.

• View backup and restore history— History of backup and restore jobs can be viewed in this area of SPCA.

• Check backup and restore job status— Enables currently running backup and restore jobs to be viewed in real time.

Granular Backup

Within the second category on the Backup and Restore page, labeled Granular Backup, the options to back up individual site collections or subcomponents to site collections are provided. This type of functionality was available in SharePoint 2007 but required use of the command-line STSADM tool and was not an option within the GUI.

• Perform a site collection backup— Enables an entire site collection to be exported to a full-fidelity flat file copy that can be exported to a different location within the farm, to the same location, or to a new location in a different farm.

• Export a site or list— Enables content within a site collection to be exported using the settings shown in Figure 21. Note that these type of exports are not full fidelity, and some settings such as individual document permissions can be lost using the export option.

  Figure 21. Exporting content using SPCA.

  

• Recover data from an unattached content database— This option, new in SharePoint 2010, is powerful, because it enables content to be recovered out of databases that are not attached to a SharePoint farm, although they do need to be attached to a SQL Server.

• Check granular backup job status— Enables administration to check on the status of an existing granular backup job.