A SharePoint Saturday on Monday #SPConfRU
June 23, 2011
It was a very pleasant and unusual experience for me this week to speak at the SharePoint Conference Russia – 2011. The conference was awesome and the crowd was much more interested in SharePoint than I was expecting. My session was the last before conference wrap up, and we stayed for almost half hour after the session for Q&A! The biggest challenge for me – surprisingly – was to keep speaking Russian, and not switch to English completely when using all the SharePoint terminology.
Having been to a number of different industry events in the US and Europe before, I cannot help comparing this conference to some of those. As far as I can tell, SharePoint Conference Russia is very close to the SharePoint Saturdays. The event is completely driven by community, in this case – Russian SharePoint User Group, and it is completely free to attend. (Thanks to the sponsors, and I am happy that my employer participated as the sponsor as well!)
- SPConfRu had simultaneous live stream online from all 3 concurrent sessions. Never seen this at any other SharePoint event really.
- The food was absolutely awesome :-) I’m not complaining about the food at other events, but here it was way better than one can expect to get a free event.
- Unlike other SharePoint Saturdays, good part of the attendees were seriously looking people in good suits – IT directors and CIO’s, not a typical attendee for a free event. I think this shows there is a lack of (and the need for) SharePoint-centric events targeted more at the business users and IT decision makers in Russia. There are no SPTechCon or SharePoint Best Practices here.
- Finally, the event was on Monday – so they had to call it SharePoint Conference instead of SharePoint Saturday :-)
So once again I’d like to say thank you to the SPConfRU organizers – Oksana and the team did absolutely great job, and I really look forward to more events from the user group in Russia.
BTW, here’re the slides from my “Planning SharePoint 2010 backup and recovery – where do I start?” session
SharePoint 2010 backup presentation from Buckeye SharePoint User Group
November 19, 2010
We had a good discussion tonight with Buckeye SharePoint User Group in Columbus around how you approach backup and recovery in 2010, and how new features might or might not change your backup strategy. Here’s the slide deck from my session:
SharePoint 2010: How new features change your backup and recovery
Apparently, there’s lots of interest in SharePoint 2010 – few folks already have it running in production, some are playing with it in the labs, while others are learning. Good times, interesting to see how SharePoint landscape changes.
When SharePoint 2010 early sneak preview was first published by the product team, one of the big wow’s were the new granular content restore capabilities, available right there in Central Administration. While this is certainly an improvement compared to earlier version of SharePoint, I still cannot call this functionality “granular content restore”. Let’s walk through the steps required to restore a document from database backup with these new capabilities.
How to Restore from Unattached Content Database, Step by Step
1. Find the backup file that contains that document you need. You’ll need to know document original location so that you can match that to the content database. You will also need to find out when the document was corrupted or deleted, so that you grab the backup file from the right date. When you have all this information you can find the reuqired backup file (or probably request it from your SQL DBA or Backup operators).
2. Restore content database to a temporary location. Backup file is not enough, to use the unattached content database recovery you need the database mounted on a SQL server. This can be the same SQL instance used by SharePoint, or a different SQL box. If you restore into the same SQL instance make sure you (or your SQL DBA’s) use a different name for the restored database and don’t override the production content! Note the name of the SQL Server instance and the name of the database copy.
3. Go to SharePoint Central Administration, navigate to Backup and Restore and click the “Recover data from an unattached content database” link under Granular Backup.
4. Type the SQL Instance and temporary database names and specify what you want to do. Note that none of the available options actually allows you to restore a document, you can either create a backup of site collection or export a site or list. If you only need a single document, you’ll need to export the library in order to get it.
5. Select site collection, site and list to export. In this step you also specify the name for the export file and the export options, such as whether security and versions should be included in the export. You are ready to start the export.
Congratulations, you have completed the Unattached Content Database Recovery now! Wait, did you actually need that document? All you have is the export.cmp file, where to look next? There is no import available in the Central Administration UI. So what do you do next?
6. Start the SharePoint Management Shell, which is PowerShell with Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell snap-in already loaded. Then use the Import-SPWeb cmdlet to import the library. It is important to understand you cannot restore list or library under a different name. If a document library with the same name already exists in the destination site, import will merge contents and by default create new document versions where possible.
7. Finally, browse to the imported library and get the document you just restored. Once this is done, you can safely delete the imported document library from SharePoint, and delete the temporary database from SQL server.
Pros and Contras of Unattached Content Database Recovery
If you ever had to perform granular content restore via a recovery farm in SharePoint 2003 or SharePoint 2007, you can see the process is not very different with 2010. The big step forward is that there is no need to maintain the recovery farm for SharePoint 2010 and you don’t have to attach the temporary database to the farm. You also have the UI to do the export via Central Administration.
However, that’s where improvements end and all the limitations remain:
- You have to know exactly which backup contains the requested data, there is no search available. If you make a mistake, it is not until the very last step in the process that you find out the document you looked for is missing after the import and you have to start it all over.
- You must use higlhy privileged account to perfrom all operations in both SQL and SharePoint, which might not be possible in some environments. Sometimes in a large organization it would take 3 different people to perform the task.
- There is no single UI to perform the operation from the first to the last step. You have to use SQL backup management tools, SharePoint Central Administration and PowerShell, which obviously increases time to restore.
- Granularity is limitied. You can restore a site collection, a site or a list/library.
- Finally, all inherited limitations of SharePoint export and import apply when restoring sites and lists from unattached content database.
Update on “Cannot find… exportsettings.xml” error when restoring site with SharePoint Designer. Go get SP2.
May 13, 2009
Remember the “Cannot find… exportsettings.xml” error when trying to restore a site with SharePoint Designer? The reason for the error was the default 25MB file size limitation for the CMP files used to store the backup.
If you tried to use SharePoint Designer for site backup and ran into this error, you just have another reason to upgrade your SharePoint farm to Service Pack 2. Why? Here’s what the TechNet article on SharePoint Designer site backup says:
If you have not installed Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with Service Pack 2 (SP2), backups that are performed by using Office SharePoint Designer are limited to 25 megabytes (MB). After you install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with SP2, the limit is increased to 2 gigabytes (GB).
For sites larger than 2GB the same workaround still applies, you can get the rest of your backup from the Site Collection Recycle Bin and manually reconcile it.
Thanks to Alex Kirillov who brought my attention to this change in WSS v3 SP2.
Technorati Tags:
sharepoint, backup, SharePoint Designer
Backup and Recovery Solutions: When Do You Use Which?
August 27, 2008
I just came across a recent SharePoint Backup / Recovery Solutions blog post by Babar Batla, Principal Solutions Specialist for Microsoft. In his list, Babar has both Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2007 and Quest Recovery Manager for SharePoint (and that’s the product I am working on). So do these products compete? Not really, they can actually complement each other! So, when do you use which?
With a recent release of Recovery Manager 2.2 we enhanced it to read and restore data from snapshots made with DPM as well as few other backup formats (see our web site for details). Adding this on top of DPM you can use the same snapshots in more SharePoint restoration scenarios:
- Granular restore with DPM is only possible for documents and sites. Recovery Manager adds restore of any SharePoint objects, from a list item or document up to a site collection (and everything in between!) – all from the backups you already have with DPM.
- Recovery Manager also gives more flexibility when the original server farm is unavailable: you can restore SharePoint data to an alternative SharePoint location or even a file share.
- In addition, organizations where backup operations are centralized can benefit from using tools like Rcovery Manager and DPM together, because this allows to separate platform disaster recovery task from document and site restore, and the latter can be delegated to application specific administrators.
Technorati tags:
backup Data Protection Manager DPM disaster recovery granular recovery Quest restore sharepoint
New SharePoint Recovery White Paper
March 24, 2008
A new white paper on enterprise SharePoint recovery by Adam Woodruff has just become available on Quest Software web site. This is an overview of things to consider and tools available natively for SharePoint backup and recovery on a high level, primarily focused on WSS v3 and MOSS 2007. Main purpose of this paper is to help with the big picture, before you proceed to more detailed technical SharePoint backup and restore tutorials or videos.
Adam Woodruff is one of the smart people here at Quest. He’s a Solutions Architect for SharePoint team, which seems to mean “the guy who spends about 25 hours a day with customers helping to implement their SharePoint strategy.” He is also a speaker at technical events like the recent SharePoint Conference in Seattle, where he gave a session about consolidating enterprise knowledge into SharePoint. I’ve been trying to force Adam into blogging for a while now, and hope we’ll see some interesting SharePoint stuff from him soon!
Yours truly also contributed to this white paper (mostly in the chapter that maps various tools to different recovery scenarios). If you have any thoughts, corrections, or comments – please leave a comment to this post, I will really appreciate this!
Technorati Tags:
SharePoint, granular recovery, backup, Quest
The SharePoint conference is over and I am about to leave Seattle and fly back home. It was great to spend these four days here. While the show was going on, I was looking around the expo hall for the 3rd party vendors who do anything related to SharePoint backup and recovery. Here are companies I spotted (in alphabetical order):
- AvePoint, one of the well known SharePoint backup vendors, obviously was here. They were giving away quite cool toy motorbikes, and gathered a bunch of folks at their booth on the last day.
- EMC was present mostly with their services offering for Windows and SharePoint. They had datasheets of their Backup Manager product for SharePoint at the booth, but no live demos. So I cannot really tell more about the product.
- Neverfail is focusing more on high availability and disk-level replication for SharePoint databases or entire farms. They kinda also talk about disaster recovery, but be careful: if anything gets corrupt in a database, replication will bring the faulty database over to the other copy. So good old backup will always be a necessary addition to such a solution.
- Quest Software was here with Recovery Manager for SharePoint as well as its other products for SharePoint management, migration and application development. This is the company I am with, so you can tell I love these products and amazing people who work on them. If you want to learn more, watch the recent SharePoint recovery best practices video: last 15 minutes or so include the Quest product overview.
I am disappointed other backup vendors like CommVault and Symantec did not show up here. I hope this does not mean they don’t take their own SharePoint backup/restore capability seriously. Or did I miss someone out there? Let me know and I’ll update this list!
Technorati Tags:
sharepoint, 3rd party, backup, restore, SharePoint Conference 2008
SharePoint Designer‘s backup is really the only backup option available to site owners who don’t have admin rights on the SharePoint servers. This makes the tool very handy in some cases, but there are few gotchas. It is not a full fidelity backup; backing up for sites larger than 25MB is possible but quite awkward; and finally – it’s too easy to run out of space on your site while making this backup. So, make sure you consider these points before you recommend this to your users:
- SharePoint Designer cannot create full-fidelity backups. Behind the scenes, it is using the same mechanism as stsadm.exe -o -export, so you can lose some metadata, customizations, etc.
- You see the awkward “Cannot find… exportsettings.xml” error when you try to back up anything larger than 24-25MB. Now, how many sites out there will realistically fit into this limit? There is a workaround from Michael Herman: it appears, larger export files end up in the Recycle Bin and can be retrieved!
- However, Recycle Bin actually counts against the site collection quota – so be careful. Trying to back up entire site means you are doubling your site size. And then you get the error for the first time, and try to run backup again… Well, you see what what can happen here, especially if you don’t plan for enough storage for Recycle Bins.
There are several good walkthroughs on the web, for example see this step-by-step on how to use SharePoint Designer backup from
I actually learned about this in the Backing Up SharePoint session on the Microsoft SharePoint Conference here in Seattle. I am a bit too lazy to blog about every day here, like Ron is doing, but I will post here the interesting stuff I see and hear around.
Technorati Tags:
sharepoint, backup, SharePoint Conference 2008, SharePoint Designer
SharePoint backup and recovery videos
February 25, 2008
A bunch of SharePoint backup and recovery videos were published recently on the web. So grab some coffee and prepare to spend next couple hours watching:
- In Chapter 6 of “SharePoint Advanced Content” on Technet James Petrosky, Senior Consultant and SharePoint Ranger from Microsoft, is talking about backup, recovery, and high availability for SharePoint. In addition to explaining content recovery vs disaster recovery, this presentation has few cool tips on how you can use SQL Server’s features to ensure data availability. This also includes a brief demo of Data Protection Manager 2007.
- The overview of SharePoint 2007 protection with DPM 2007 from the DPM team is also available separately. This is the same presentation included in the broader James’ video.
- Finally, a recording of the recent SharePoint recovery best practices webcast by Doug Davis just became available – Five things you need to know about SharePoint recovery. In the first part Doug talked about SharePoint recovery in general, last 15 minutes or so are more focused on Quest products for SharePoint recovery and management.
Enjoy!
Technorati Tags:
sharepoint, 3rd party, availability, backup, restore, Data Protection Manager, Quest
Okay, it is real now: the DPM blog announced System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 Release Candidate few days ago. I am not going to talk about all cool new features of DPM 2007, there are loads of info on it’s web page (by the way, including pricing and licensing options). But one new feature I am excited about is the new document level recovery for SharePoint! And it is new in this build, actually, it was not available in Beta builds, so I cannot wait to try it live!
Unfortunately, there is not as much info available about SharePoint protection yet as for other platforms: for example, there are white papers on protecting Exchange or SQL. I would love to see similar white paper about SharePoint protection eventually, but now we have the build to explore – what are you waiting for?! Download the free 120-day trial software, try it and tell what you think about it. And here’s a great DPM installation walkthrough from Sean Earp to help – thanks Sean!
My very first observations are:
- It does not keep data twice! Same snapshot is being used to restore entire database (or all databases within a farm) or to restore a site or just a document. Very cool, no more stressful and long site-level backups with STSADM.exe.
- It allows browsing and searching through SharePoint contents from within the DPM Console, and selectively restore the data that you need. Way better than you could ever get from SQL backup and STSADM.
- It requires a staging SharePoint server (all-in-one installation seems to be enough) for granular recoveries. Looks like DPM automates the good old method of re-attaching content database to a staging server, and eliminates most of the manual work this method requires from admin.
- Document level restore only available for SharePoint Services 3.0 and MOSS 2007. You can still use DPM to protect WSS 2.0 and SPS 2003 content databases, as part of SQL protection functionality.
I will blog more about DPM and SharePoint recovery as soon as I play more with it.
Technorati Tags:
backup, DPM, Data Protection Manager, restore, granular recovery, SharePoint, SQL, MOSS 2007, WSS v3.0
