Wednesday, March 31, 2010
SharePoint Disaster Recovery Plan
A note from Mark Miller
This came in my email box this morning. It’s WAY outside my area of expertise, but I thought it would be good to expose the question and get some expert feedback from the community.
Any suggestions or comments appreciated.
From Chip: I am looking for a 3rd party tool for Disaster recovery for SharePoint. Do you have any recommendations or know of anyone that has compared them?
The three main items I am looking for a SharePoint 2007 environment in order of importance are:
1. Complete disaster recovery preferable a warm swap
2. Restoration of granular documents, sites and site collections.
3. Ability to move sites onto other servers and into site collections.
Thanks for any help.
Chip
on
My first stop would be on SharePointReviews.com, to search for Disaster Recovery:
http://www.sharepointreviews.com/component/search/disaster.html?ordering=&searchphrase=all
Best person to speak to on this subject would be John Ferringer (@ferringer). He’s king of backup and has written an excellent book on this very subject.
Ok, let’s all invite John over for tea and have him expound on his knowledge of backup plans. John, the floor is yours… in another article of course, because we all know John can’t say anything in one paragraph. — Mark
Oh my. Dave, Mark, I’m insanely flattered, although Dave goes way too far. I think the closest I can come to claiming any sort of title would be that of Squire, since it was my high school’s mascot…
Mark’s right, I am incapable of being brief on pretty much anything, so I’d be happy to try and come up with an article. One quick resource to tide you over with, for the SharePoint 2007 Guide Sean McDonough and I put together an appendix listing many of the third party products that were out on the market at the time of publication. But, since we were long-winded (see, there’s a pattern of behavior here), it was made available as a free electronic download from our publisher. You can take a look at it at http://tinyurl.com/SPDRProductList
I’ll see what I can do on the article side of things; Mark, I’ll send you an email to follow up. Thanks for the kind words and the heads up!
John
I’ve used Quest Recovery Manager for SharePoint in the past with tremendous success. It works very well with multiple backup providers, and can allow item level restores. It gets bundled with their administration tool that provides a lot of useful reports — things like duplicate files, user permissions, over-utilized site collections, orphaned files, etc. The reports are part of SQL reporting services, so if SQL Reporting Services is integrated into your SharePoint implementation, they can be displayed in SharePoint as well. You can find more information at:
http://www.quest.com/sharepoint/recovery-and-auditing.aspx
We also have some clients that are using AvePoint as well and find that to be a solid product as well. I cannot speak to the product as I have no first hand knowledge. More information can be found here:
http://avepoint.com/sharepoint-data-protection-software/
Mark has given the best answer really because there are so many factors to be considered that no one product fits all. As an admin, I have direct experience with DocAve and their support and have had excellent results but you know, you can’t really have enough backups in a variety of formats, so I don’t just rely on AvePoint. I do my own IIS backups and other sorts of maint. You’ve done a good job of defning what you need, time to do a little leg work to see what will fit your budget and the like. Good luck!
Take a look at XOSOFT replication software from Computer Associates. They should be able to give you a complete warm site recovery. I use them now for SQL and Exchange.
Pull in Mike Watson too. He’s really the king of high availibility (that I know of) and can provide possible options.
Depending on your needs and budget it might be worth looking at Data Protection Manager. I know if I had stayed at my former employer we probably would have used that (they may still have, I haven’t spoken with any of them lately and don’t know for sure).
There are some resource links on my blog that might help you answer any specific questions you may have.
Jay
http://www.sharepointmechanic.com/?p=34
Thanks for all the feedback. I am the SP admin/developer as well as new application developer and SQL Server guy. My study time is limited so all this is helpful to filter it down.
Avepoint is probably among the better out there …
Microsoft DPM is also good if you want to do Disaster Recovery on whole VM …
I’m solo Admin and support for SharePoint small farm with 1500+ users and no budget for a warm swap solution I have been looking (and hoping) for a suite. If you are wearing all the hats, you might be in same boat. I have been looking at AvePoint, Quest, Idera, Xavor, Axceler, and Bamboo. Wide range of capabilities and cost. I’ve received my third email from Axceler today about their online webinar tomorrow at 2pm EDT, European webcast on Friday. AvePoint, Quest, and Idera also have similiar presentations. I kept Bamboo on the list for some interesting web parts that might take some support headaches away, but I would not include them in disaster recovery picture.
If your education time is limited, look for combination from single vendor. Best of Breed solutions are great when you have time and/or bodies, but SharePoint will probably be able to fill up your day. I am hoping for something that will put some hours back in my week.
I would recommend John and Sean’s book. Not sure when 2010 version will be out, but if you are supporting 2007 the current version is surprisingly good considering the topic. A lot of information on the process, not just tools. Advanced planning and preparation is mentioned several times. Better is to catch Sean and/or John at a SharePoint Saturday. Hour moves along quickly and they are great about answering questions.
There is a disaster recovery plan for SharePoint but this will mean that you have to change your storage infrastructure. It will mean that your SharePoint content should be stored in an external storage environment based on for instance Caringo CAStor and not in the SQL Server. That’s better anyhow and not only for disaster recovery. I wrote a blog article on company data disasters: http://www.synergy4.eu/blog/how-hypothetical-are-company-data-disasters
I know that this info might be a bit off topic what Chip is looking for and the proposed solution too ‘heavy’ for small SharePoint environments. But in the cases that you are working with / for bigger SharePoint environments with larger amount of data the back-end storage part of SharePoint will become more an issue. By connecting SharePoint to external storage by using connecting providers like STEALTH Software (http://www.synergy4.eu/products/stealth-software-content-store) backup and restore issues are much faster as only metadata are in SQL and the content in the external storage where it is automatically duplicated.
In all the cases that SharePoint is a small environment and/or there is no budget I would stick to the suggestions above. Just wanted to point out that there is an alternative on storage level.
Chip,
One thing seems to be missing from the discussion. None of us has asked about your environment. I have assumed that since you said SharePoint 2007, you are referring to MOSS not WSS. I have also assumed based on the number of hats you are wearing you have a small farm, but that really does not address the size of you DBs or even whether SQL is on same box or separate. What is your service level agreement? No loss of data, back up in 5 minutes or when you have get around to it. Is cost a factor or are you hiring?
Hope you let us know where you go as a solution.