Forum Discussion

JKIM1's avatar
JKIM1
Level 3
11 years ago

Sharepoint Backup

Hi,

 

Is there a clear guideline for SharePoint backup in Netbackup?

I have three-server SP farm with a couple of TBs. I have been trying to back up by VMware policy, which is clearly not working for grabbing all data from backend.

We have an requirement for DR, ie. setting up a new SharePoint server in DR site in the event of disaster.

So we realised it would be a nice solution to set up a VMware policy on three SP servers and recover the vmdks if necessary, hoping that it would bring back SP in one piece. As people tend to think that SAN based backup would be more efficient in terms of speed, I need to have one policy for VMware.

Is it a plausible scenario?

 

I've read NB documentation on the best approach to SP backup. It suggests we create two or three small policies for SP;

 

1) Non-Granular backup for DR purpose, full and incremental

2) Full Backup for GRT restore, which only supports full backup

3) Policy for Index backup (optional)

 

I'm thinking to set up two of above policies and another one for VMware backup to keep the people happy.

 

Can anyone suggest what's best strategy on SP backup (DR and normal)?

 

Cheers,

John

 

 

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  • INT_RND's avatar
    INT_RND
    Level 6
    11 years ago

    A VM snap is great for full system recovery. The problem is that the database in the VM image is live. It's not going to gracefully come up if you were to only restore from a live VM image. If you shut the system down completely and got a cold image then it would be perfect for DR. You could restore and boot from cold.

    Nobody wants to power down their database server for cold backups and this is why we recommend multiple policies. 

    For DR you want to be able to recover the server with your VM image and then perform the latest full SharePoint restore to get your database back.

    The third granular backup is for regular restores when you don't need a fully recovery image.

     

    I recommend doing a DR test in a non-production subnet. See for yourself if the process I described works.

     

    Here is the Admin Guide for SharePoint:

    http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=DOC6480