Backup and Recovery - RealSharePoint.com

6/4/2009

Sometimes life doesn't have to be difficult. If you've ever found yourself wondering how to efficiently move from one stage in the product lifecycle to another in your Sharepoint environment, then consider this:

Hector Ruiz, a consultant on the London Tideway SharePoint Migration project, writes in his blog about his success with DocAve's content management capabilities. Hector got the job done using DocAve's ability to set backup schedules and out of place restore capabilities.

Posted at 2:35 PM by AVEPOINT\Jack.Kuo | Category: Migration; Backup and Recovery; Deployment Architecture | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

4/24/2009

FLASH: Microsoft Reveals that Common STSADM Command Can Corrupt Content DB's

Microsoft just released a knowledge base article that will likely send shivers down the backs of SharePoint administrators around the globe. According to Microsoft, the STSADM command MergeContentDB may fail when attempted on a site collection bigger than 10GB. Not exactly comforting news. But the really scary part is that running the command for collections over 10GB can cause both the source and the destination databases to become corrupted. (Ughh.)

Here's what Microsoft had to say:

"Under certain circumstances, the STSADM MergeContentDB command may fail in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. These circumstances include combinations of significant site collection size, user traffic, and SQL Server load. When the STSADM MergeContentDB command fails, both the source and destination databases can be corrupted."

It's not fun to hear that an STSADM command regularly used by admins can corrupt Content DB's. But it does speak to the importance of having a powerful SharePoint backup and recovery solution, so you can restore your data swiftly and with full fidelity should corruption occur. And in case you're looking for such a solution, I happen to have the inside scoop on the most powerful and cost-effective solution in the industry.

Posted at 4:10 PM by Tucker Hall | Category: Backup and Recovery; SharePoint Tips and Tricks; SharePoint News | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

4/15/2009

A work-around to restore granularity?

One of the many roles of an AvePoint Systems Engineer is to provide professional services to customers who have recently purchased DocAve. These customers might be looking to gain additional value out of our products by being taught how to leverage all of the included functionality, or they might simply be looking for training on how to properly configure and tune their DocAve system. My most recent on-site professional services visit was to a large enterprise customer near Washington, D.C. This customer was interested in learning best practices for DocAve deployment and configuration. I arrived on-site and began configuring the backup plans. During configuration of the platform-level backup, I noticed this customer had over 200 content databases! When I asked why they had so many content databases, I was told that on recommendation from a high-ranking SharePoint consultant, they were told to associate one content database per site collection in order to attain site-collection restore granularity! They certainly had their site-collection restore granularity all right...Anytime they lost a site they could restore the content database, but these 200 content DB's were making SharePoint management a nightmare! Think about the time required to mirror 200 content DB's over to standby server! What happens when you need to add a user to 200 site collections? DocAve was able to provide them with item-level restore granularity, allowing this customer to consolidate down to a reasonable number of content databases, saving a lot of headaches.

Posted at 9:43 AM by AVEPOINT\Michael.Shine | Category: Backup and Recovery | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

3/26/2009

Suite 2.0 - Old Thinking vs. New Realities

Storage Decision recently published an article on application-specific backup tools that has caused me to do some thinking. The more I thought about the article and its framing, the more I realized it represents an old, outdated way of thinking. Here’s what I mean…

Let’s face it, SharePoint is a disruptive technology…and it’s not alone. Gazing into the technology horizon, it’s easy to discern that the world is moving ever-onward toward continually disruptive technologies. New terms like “Enterprise 2.0”, “Web 2.0” and “Cloud Computing” seem to enter the community lexicon almost daily. It’s a wonderful thing, and speaks to our continuing innovation. But it also speaks to a fundamental change in the way we must think about our technology solutions.

These emerging technologies have two things in common: First, the technologies themselves are empowering end-users to generate and share original content at an unprecedented scale. This is an unabashedly good thing. The second common feature of these technologies results from the first, but is not so wonderful: Across the board, these technologies require complex backend architectures, server arrays, and systems configurations to operate. This means that – though the end-user is empowered – administrators face a whole new world of complexity with regard to backend management. Consequently, the quaint terms, nice little boxes, and silo-styled thinking that the IT world has used to classify technologies are no longer accurate. A great example of this is common use of the terms “Point Solution” and “Suite”. The way today’s less inspired media uses these terms reveals how little they actually understand the changing reality of technology generally, and the evolution of platform solutions in particular.

In contrast to the Storage Decision article, I would argue that any “backup-only” solution – regardless of the number of disparate platforms it protects - is actually the new “point solution”. A solution that only delivers backup, even if it does so across a handful of platforms, cannot be classified as a suite. Rather, it is a point solution for backup, and that’s all.

This is primarily because the multiple platforms these “backup-only suite solutions” claim to protect have become so unique and complex, the multi-platform solution is incapable of delivering adequate functionality for any particular one of them. The smart “backup-only” vendors have realized this, and have started adding archiving and other functions to their backup-point solutions. But without true expertise in the particular platform and its complexities, it’s rarely – if ever - a best-of-breed solution.

The new “suite” approach is to take a complex platform, truly understand its usage and its infrastructure requirements, and build a product to fully address its needs in all their nuance and complexity. This approach leads to the creation of a full menu of best-of-breed, platform-specific products. This is the “suite” of the 21st century. Suite 2.0.

Marginally addressing a single concern (e.g. backup) across a handful of platforms is the new “point” solution. Point 2.0.

Comprehensively handling the infrastructure management requirements of a platform in all of its complexity – that’s a new suite.

The smart companies have realized this. To see this you only have to look as far as IBM and their very recent restructuring of the Tivoli sales organization. IBM, like most companies stuck in the old way of thinking, used to have storage experts that targeted the storage administrators responsible for doing backup, and tried to sell backup-only solutions to them. But IBM realized that with the dawn of platforms like SharePoint, the decision-making landscape was changing. When IBM’s salespeople talked to prospects about

SharePoint, the storage admin was no longer involved in the backup management decision. It was now the Windows application people and the SharePoint team running the show. And it was these same folks who were also making decisions about platform architecture, archiving, configuration, security management, system look and feel, etc. So IBM restructured their sales team to reflect the new reality. No longer would IBM’s backup experts target storage admins – but rather they would have platform management experts target the application admins. Today, IBM leverages enterprise sales reps that know the platform, and they sell “suites” of solutions that meet multiple needs across a single platform. No longer are they trying to sell a single backup platform for multiple systems, but instead have appreciated the unique, integrated needs of the platform as a whole, and approach the platform admins saying, “Oh, you’re using that system. Well, look at all the things we can do for it.”

This is a telling story when considering SharePoint backups. To simply say that SharePoint data protection involves only database backups fundamentally misunderstands the concerns of today’s SharePoint administrator. Saying database backups are sufficient to adequately protect the platform shows a clear lack of understanding of SharePoint, how it is used, and how it is deployed. A single SharePoint content database can have hundreds of sites, each with very different use and very different requirements and service level agreements. Some can be highly business-critical and some less so. If the business-criticality of Site A demands hourly backups, and Site B demands weekly backups, is it realistically adequate to leverage a solution that can’t discern between sites? No one is going to backup the entire database every hour! Several of the so-called “suite” solutions referenced in the Storage Decision article advertise that they can do item-level restores from a database backup, but how many of them can do item-level backup? The answer is they can’t, so how protected is the platform?

And what about all the customizations, webparts, and features that are integral components of those sites, but that aren’t part of the database and sit on the web or app servers? It only takes one disaster for companies to realize how critical these componansts are. How many of these so-called “suite Solutions” can backup anything outside the content database? The answer? None.

"Suite" isn’t exactly the right term for these solutions, is it?

And that’s just the backup side. Today’s "Suite 2.0" delivers all of the infrastructure management solutions an SP admin needs to protect, optimize, and manage his or her deployment. That’s a Suite 2.0 solution, not a point solution.

AvePoint’s DocAve is comprised of 20 different modules, each independently deployable yet fully integrated into a unified platform. Together, they handle everything from backup and restore, high availability, centralized configuration and security management, content management and restructuring, data synchronization and replication, archiving, auditing, eDiscovery, monitoring, reporting and analytics, and migration from legacy data sources. This is no point solution. I’d argue that DocAve is the true suite here, and that people who are used to the old terminologies—where one specific function (like backup), marginally performed across multiple platforms was considered a suite—are going to have to comprehend the type of suites today's administrators demand. Suite 2.0. It’s a new world, with a new perspective. The old ways of thinking and discussing platform solutions no longer hold. It’s about time the media started realizing it.

Posted at 6:20 PM by Tony Lanni | Category: Events and Happenings; SharePoint News; Backup and Recovery; Administration; DocAve Tips and Tricks; SharePoint Tips and Tricks | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

3/4/2009

Now Backup & Restore Your SharePoint "My Sites"

The long-awaited functionality is here! Did you know that DocAve 5.1.1 allows you to backup and restore SharePoint mySites at a granular level? You can choose to restore any "My Details" "My Links," "My Colleagues," or "My Memberships" as well. This functionality makes DocAve's award-winning granular Backup and Recovery that much more powerful.

Posted at 9:15 AM by AVEPOINT\Michael.Shine | Category: Backup and Recovery; DocAve Tips and Tricks | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

2/17/2009

Upcoming TechNet Webinar on Best Practices in SharePoint Administration

Ever wondered how much is it costing your organization in supporting your SharePoint environment? Or perhaps you are looking for ways to simplifying your deployment, to be able to achieve success with the constraints you are bound by. Check out this upcoming webinar on TechNet on “Best Practices in SharePoint Administration – Lower Admin Costs by Doing More with Less”. The key is really about doing more with less. In today’s economy, we all need to be wary of how we control, deploy, and protect our investments, so that we can realize the return that we are expecting. The same applies to SharePoint – successful implementation requires proper design, effective governance, continuous availability, and vigorous protection.

There are various cost drivers when deploying or management SharePoint. These could be IT productivity costs, infrastructure costs, or costs for safeguarding your environment. Without the appropriate support, your organization runs the risk of treating SharePoint just like another document repository, and that’s really not doing it justice. The last thing you want on SharePoint is an unmanaged environment with stale content, and unsatisfied users.

So, check it out. The webinar will be held live on Wednesday, February 25, 2009, at 10am PT. To register, simply click on this registration link.

Posted at 3:46 PM by Andrew Yeung | Category: Administration; Archiving; Backup and Recovery; Compliance; Events and Happenings | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)

2/5/2009

Meeting Backup Data Retention Policy for Organizations

Storage of backup data is an issue with many companies. Not all companies have an abundance of space to house their backup data that resides on disk. Now each company has its own retention periods and requirements for their backup data.

DocAve has a built-in solution for companies that have a limited amount of storage space or need to meet regulatory retention periods for their backup data. The Data Pruning method will allow DocAve administrators to set a retention setting based or a time frame or even an incremental amount of backups based on storage available. DocAve administrators can setup the Data pruning to trigger on different types of backup jobs for example full, incremental or differential backups. The trigger time for when the pruning job is activated can be set to happen when a backup job is kicked off or completed. The Data pruning feature has many different setting options to configure your retention setting for your backup data to keep you within your storage limitation.

Posted at 2:42 PM by Faraz Saiyed | Category: Backup and Recovery | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

2/2/2009

Automatic Failover to a Standby Server

Most of you are probably familiar with DocAve's "High-Availability" feature. DocAve's High Availability module is a one-switch disaster recovery solution for Microsoft SharePoint. It allows SQL database replication to a standby environment in order to minimize downtime. Until DocAve v5.1.1, during a disaster you would have to navigate to the DocAve "Failover Controller" to bring online your standby system. Not anymore! New to 5.1.1, DocAve High Availability can plug-in to any existing auto-failover detection mechanisms/scripts. When a failover is detected, a batch file can be run from the command line that will automate the execution of a user-configured failover plan. 0 Downtime!

Posted at 8:48 AM by AVEPOINT\Michael.Shine | Category: Backup and Recovery; DocAve Tips and Tricks | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

1/27/2009

The Problem with Restoring SharePoint Content from SQL Server Backups

So here is the setup...

Your organization has existing SQL Server backups from all your SQL Server databases. You've migrated your content onto SharePoint, but your organization still depends on the SQL backup to cover your SharePoint content databases. Then one day, the inevitable happens and some user calls the help desk with a corrupted document that has to be restored ASAP.

What do you do?

Well, your first instinct might be to restore that content database to a previous state, but you can't do that as you'll wipe out all the changes to SharePoint content since then.

Then you think about restoring the SharePoint content database to a staging server, hook up a scratch web application to it, browse down to the content you are trying to restore, export it out, and import it back into production SharePoint. This might work, but it's a painfully tedious manual process, and any history and metadata associated with the content will be lost...unless entered again manually.

It looks like you'll have to go to your tool chest. Enter DocAve v5, which includes a "Restore from SQL Backup" feature that does exactly what you want!

There are two ways to use the tool. You can browse through a staged content database, or have DocAve stage and analyze the database backup file for you. Either way, you pick and choose exactly what content you want to restore (down to the item-version level), and decide where you want to restore it. DocAve takes care of the rest!

For existing DocAve v5 customers, this feature is easy to use: Using the navagation bar, simply navigate to Data Protection -->Restore Controller-->Restore from SQL Backup.

For those who aren't yet DocAve users, take a few moments to learn more about DocAve's powerful Backup and Recovery module.

Posted at 3:02 PM by Han Wang | Category: Backup and Recovery; DocAve Tips and Tricks; SharePoint Tips and Tricks | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

1/22/2009

AvePoint Releases DocAve v5.1.1

Holding true to its reputation for delivering pioneering solution enhancements before the competition has even caught up with its last round, AvePoint has released DocAve v5.1.1 - which includes some pretty amazing upgrades to the DocAve v5 platform released last fall. Here's a quick rundown of the cool new gadgets and features you'll find in this latest release...

Real-time Extranet Replication

DocAve Replicator provides for both live and scheduled extranet synchronization. By enabling one-way and two-way replication over HTTP/HTTPS internet protocols, DocAve Replicator unburdens administrators from having to open additional ports in their firewall, or ensure that all replication agents are within the same network.

Administration Security Trimming, Dead-Account Detection/Deletion, One-Step Permissions Transfer

DocAve SharePoint Administrator now empowers SharePoint administrators to delegate security management to site collection administrators – providing them trimmed views of, and control over, only content and users for which they have been given appropriate permissions. Additionally, SharePoint Administrator now includes an automated dead-account recognition, transfer, and deletion utility. This powerful tool compares discrete SharePoint accounts with those present in Active Directory, and provides administrators with flexible options to handle asynchronous account events, including account deletion and permissions transfer to new accounts.

End-User Archiving and Comprehensive Archive Reporting

DocAve Extension Archiver now lets administrators empower their end-users with the ability to archive content directly within the SharePoint interface. Via the Site Actions menu within SharePoint, end-users can archive content for which they have permissions, enabling business-apprpriate archiving levels and optimal platform performance. Additionally, DocAve’s administrative report now provides comprehensive archiving information, including archived site size, number of items archived, and SQl storage re-patriation statistics.

Total EMC Centera Integration

Now EMC Centera users can leverage the solution’s potent du-duplication capabilities fully when managing DocAve archive and backup data. DocAve Backup and Recovery and Extension Archiver empower EMC Centera users to enable integrated de-duping of their DocAve archive and backup stores, to ensure optimal storage resource utilization.

XML-Based Mapping Profile Integration for Migrations

DocAve Migrator Suite lets administrators import and export XML mapping profiles to further streamline migration jobs requiring extensive mapping. Now administrators can edit profiles in any XML editor, upload the file into DocAve, and both manage and track the authored files via the DocAve interface.

To learn more about the DocAve v5.1.1 release and to download a fully-enabled trial version of the platform, check out the AvePoint website.

Posted at 11:26 AM by Tucker Hall | Category: Archiving; Backup and Recovery; Compliance; Deployment Architecture; Events and Happenings; SharePoint News; Migration; Administration; DocAve Tips and Tricks | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

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