How to best backup SharePoint 2013 with 2008R2 SQL and VMware?

Since your SharePoint databases are on a separate machine you cannot do VM GRT backups of your SharePoint farm. You need to run a separate job to backup the farm using the SharePoint agent.

Thanks for your reply.

So you mean that when I do the vmware backup of the sharepoint server I´ll just do that without GRT?

And backup the Farm separately.

 

How should I backup the SQL server then?

Yes to your first two questions. For your SQL VM, you would need to do GRT backups because you said you have non-SharePoint databases on it

Thanks!

But if I backup the SQL using GRT I get the error message in my first post when the Sharepoint farm backup runs.

How should I prevent that?

1. Do not backup SQL using other backup software or SQL maintenance. 2. If you are backing up the SQL VM and a job using the SQL agent, then do you VM backup before the full SQL backup, not between the full backup and any log/differential backup

1. I don´t use any other backup software, and the Maintenance jobs don´t run backups.

2. Now I´m backup up the SQL server using VMware GRT with SQL GRT enabled. And I´m using the exact same schedule when full/inc is done as the SharePoint backup.

Please explain a bit more. I need someone to tell me how I should set this up so everything runs without error messages. I want to run full backups once a month and incrementals every day in between. Should I change the backup time a bit for one of these jobs so that I now which starts first? In that case, which server?

See these two documents

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH137587

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH58674

 

Your schedule must be something like this

VM backup

SQL Full

SQL Log/Differential

It cannot be something like this

SQL Full

VM backup

SQL Log/Differential

Ok,

This is exactly how it´s configured now:

Server A(MS SQL with all sharepoint databases plus lots of other databases):

- Is backed up using VMware agent with GRT enabled for files and SQL, plus enabled log backups

- Full backup runs one saturday every month at 00:10

- Incrementals run every workday at 20:00

 

Server B(SharePoint 2013):

- Is backed up using VMware agent with GRT enabled for files only

- Full backup runs one saturday every month at 00:10

- Incrementals run every workday at 20:00

 

SharePoint 2013 Farm:

- Full backup runs one saturday every month at 00:10

- Incrementals run every workday at 20:00

 

What should I change/add to make this work? The error message is for the SharePoint Farm job only. all other backups are Successful.

 

ServerA is out of the picture because it does not have any Sharepoint resources.

However, for all 3 servers, your schedule is very bad because when you restore incremental backups, you need to restore the last full backup plus ALL the incremental backups since then.  Imagine if you need to restore something on the 30th of the month, your restore will take forever.

You should do full backups more frequently like weekly.

For the Sharepoint farm, assuming that you do a full backup on Sunday and incremental backups on Mon-Fri.  You can only run VM backups after the last incremental backup on Friday and the Sun full backup.  If you run VM backups during any other time, you will get the error message.

ServerA is out of the picture because it does not have any Sharepoint resources.

The SQL server holds all Sharepoint databases, so I would definately say it contains SharePoint resources, but it depends on what you mean with Sharepoint resources.

 

However, for all 3 servers, your schedule is very bad

The schedule works satisfactory for this customer. We seldom do restores, and everything is located on fast fibre SAN so a restore is very quick. We have done lots of test on this and 30 incrementals in a row is not a problem. Focus for this customer is the archivals for several years so everything is duplicated multiple times to other sites. So in this case the schedule is not very bad.

 

But with regards to the SharePoint farm, I don´t think I understand exactly what you mean. Do you mean that I should leave the Sharepoint farm and SQL server backups as they are now and only adjust the schedule for the Sharepoint server? Or have I misunderstand you?(this is probably the case ;))