Using SharePoint Central Administration for Backup and Restore

The SharePoint 2010 Central Administration Backup and Restore page now comes with two options for backup and restore:

• Farm Backup and Restore

• Granular Backup and Restore

Using the Farm Backup and Restore option, SharePoint administrators can back up the following:

• Complete Farm

• Farm Configuration Only

• Individual Components in a Farm

Granular backup and restore is a new addition in SharePoint 2010 Central Administration tool that enables SharePoint administrators to do the following:

• Back up site collection

• Export document library or list

Ideally the SharePoint Central Administration tool would be used to do a once-off backup or restore operation. As with previous versions, scheduling backups via the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration tool is not an option from within the GUI.

Back Up Using Central Administration

Before backing up using the SharePoint Central Administration tool, the backup location needs to be configured. The backup location can be a local drive on the server or a network share.

Farm Configuration Backup

To back up farm configuration using the SharePoint Central Administration tool, perform the following steps:

1.	Open the SharePoint Central Administration site on a SharePoint Server (Start, All Programs, Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products, SharePoint 2010 Central Administration).
2.	Select Backup and Restore in Quick Launch.
3.	Under the Farm Backup and Restore section, select Perform a Backup.
4.	From the Select Component to Backup page, select the Farm component, as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1. Backing up a farm from the Central Administration tool.
5.	Click Next at the bottom of the page.
6.	In the Select Backup Options page, select the full backup, as shown in Figure 2. (When performing a backup of the component for the first time, differential backup should not be selected because the backup operation will fail.) Figure 2. Choosing backup options in the Central Administration tool.
7.	In the next section, on the same page, select Back Up Only Configuration Settings and click Next.
8.	In the next section, on the same page, enter a backup location and click Start Backup.

After starting the backup, SharePoint 2010 displays the Backup and Restore Job Status page. It might take several minutes for the backup process to appear on the page, depending on the backup type and the data to back up. On this page, the backup and restore progress can be monitored by clicking the View History link, View the Backup, and Restore History.

Backup files can viewed in the Backup location selected earlier and appear as an XML manifest file, as shown in Figure 3, and as a folder full of BAK files, as shown in Figure 4. It is recommended not to delete the XML manifest file in the root because it will be required to restore your backup components.

Figure 3. Examining a SharePoint backup manifest file.

Figure 4. Viewing a site backup file location.

Note

When doing configuration backup, service application settings, including service proxies, are not included in the backup.