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

As promised last week, we’re giving away three copies of SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide, a book by John Ferringer and Sean McDonough.

If you’re following my blog, you already know about the new SharePoint community we (Quest Software) have launched at www.SharePointForAll.com. So I want to try and use this opportunity to bring more good people to the community.

To win your free copy of the book, you need to:

1. Join the SharePoint For All community if you’re not a registered member yet. It’s very simple, but gives you access to the forums and downloads on the site. Downloads include pre-release Beta versions of Quest management and migration tools for SharePoint, as well as freeware tools such as SharePoint Disaster Recovery Advisor.
2. Publish a link to SharePoint for all site on your SharePoint-related blog or on a publicly available SharePoint-related forum. It can be a link to the site’s home page, or any of the downloads, or any blog post on the Quest team blog, whatever is more relevant to the topic of your post.
3. Finally, send an email with the two links to a special email address: get-a-book@sharepoint-recovery.com. Your email should include links to your profile at SharePointForAll.com community site and to your blog/forum post, and your name/contact info.

The first three winners will get the free copy of SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide. You can see my review of the book here, and read more about it on Amazon.com.

One more note, you cannot win the book if you work for Quest. Sorry, guys – I can lend you my copy if you want to read it :-)

Once again, many thanks to the publisher, Cengage Learning, for giving me this opportunity.

Technorati Tags:
book review, community, disaster recovery, Quest, SharePoint

You must have seen it on a number of blogs already, starting with Mark Rackley’s “SharePoint Designer – a definite maybe” post last Sunday: SharePoint Designer is now free for anyone to download and use. See official details from Microsoft and the download link in a Letter to SharePoint Designer customers.

Well… Enough said by Marc and in Joel’s response: I highly recommend reading both posts. Although they seem to disagree on some details, bottom line of both posts is the same: SharePoint Designer is a powerful and very handy tool if you know what you’re doing. Otherwise it can be disastrous. So… if you don’t lock down SPD use in your farms, make sure you have a good backup before your users start playing with it!

Technorati Tags:
MOSS 2007, sharepoint, sharepoint administration, sharepoint designer

Nice people from Cengage Learning contacted me recently for a review of a book they published. The book is called SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide and was written by John L. Ferringer and Sean McDonough.

They were also very kind to send me three copies of the book for giveaway, but since you won’t believe it on April 1st anyway ;-) there’ll be a separate post soon explaining how to win your copy.

Who’s should read this book?

This book will be invaluable for SharePoint administrators who already have a good understanding of how data is stored in SharePoint and have some technical experience with built-in backup and recovery tools. I think it would be a difficult read for those who only have end user experience with SharePoint and are new to the platform administration. It will be overwhelming and confusing for such readers.

Why read this book?

I think that anyone who already has such experience and is tasked with preparing an overall disaster recovery plan should read this. Here’s the good stuff you will find in the book:

• Helpful tips on what you can do with the native backup and recovery tools and how you could extend them via scripting and custom development can be found troughout the book, specifically in chapters 6-7.
• If you are SharePoint administrator with not much experience in technologies it depends on, such as IIS and SQL Server, you’ll find quite a few insights here and get a bigger picture of what tools exist and can be used in SharePoint disaster recovery. Chapters 8 through 11 cover SQL server and Windows backup and recovery and high availability.
• Real jewels in chapters 12 through 14 (DR Planning and Key Concepts; Design and Implementation; Testing and Maintenance) are a must-read for any technical staff responsible for SharePoint recovery. Too often we think of SharePoint just from technical perspective, these chapters help to put the technology in the right place from perspective of the overall business continuity planning.

Some suggestions for the Second Edition

Few things that I believe could be done better to make the book more straightforward for SharePoint newbies, not only administrators with good level of understanding:

• Add an overview of how SharePoint data, configurations, and customizations are stored. A lot of this information is scattered throughout the book, but there’s no single chapter in the book to serve as a reference. Things like Joel’s SharePoint containment hierarchy could really help here.
• Make it very clear how much technical knowledge and experience is assumed. Some sections of the book surprised me by too detailed explanations of the basics (like the default install paths with screenshots, etc.), while the very next page can mention about IP bindingsin IIS with no explanation at all.
• Re-write or cut the chapters that cover topics that are not directly related to disaster recovery. It’s good to know about recycle bins, SharePoint Designer backups, and maybe even the options such as saving site templates with content. But none of these really fits into the disaster recovery plan discussed further on in the book, and spending almost 60 pages on them might be too much.
• Get another round of technical review to ensure all technical details are accurate and there is no ambiguity. For example, in several places the book mentions you can restore a single site collection from a Central Administration backup. In reality, this is only true when you keep one site collection per content database. This assumption is never articulated in the book, which can be really misleading for readers who don’t have hands-on experience with Central Administration and STSADM.exe backups.

Bottom line:

SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide is a great resource for SharePoint administrators with good technical understanding of SharePoint overall architecture and built-in backup and recovery tools. From reading it you can learn how you can extend the use of the native tools with other methods, and see what other technologies such as Windows Server and SQL Server have to offer. Finally, the book allows you to take a step back and see the bigger picture of SharePoint disaster recovery from the business perspective.

So, take your time to review the ToC with John’s comments and stay tuned for the giveaway details!

Technorati tags:
book review; disaster recovery; sharepoint; sql; stsadm.exe

When you start planning for disaster recovery of your SharePoint farm you inevitably face the challenge of how to restore the farm configuration.

What is a configuration database? A configuration database in SharePoint is what defines your farm. It keeps all the information about other databases, servers and services that comprise the farm. It also stores info about “all Internet Information Services (IIS) Web sites or Web applications, solutions, Web Part packages, site templates, and Web application and farm settings specific to SharePoint technologies, such as default quota, blocked file types, and configuration” (from Database types and descriptions). If you want to drill into this in more detail, take a look at the database structure explained in Nidhi’s blog.

The coolest thing about configuration database in my opinion is how it serves as a central piece in WSS 3.0 architecture to allow administrators easily scale a SharePoint farm. All the global farm settings, most of IIS configuration (some details in Joel’s post here), and even solution binaries are stored in the config database and will be automatically propagated from there when you join more servers to the farm.

What’s the problem with backup/recovery of configuration database? Restoration of SharePoint configuration database is not supported by Microsoft if all you do is just take farm backup via Central Administration or with STSADM. In case of disaster recovery, you would have to manually re-create all farm settings, re-deploy any solutions and customizations, etc. A related article on TechNet gives a little insight on what causes this support limitation:

Although the configuration database and the SharePoint Central Administration Web site content database can be backed up, restoring backups of the configuration database and Central Administration content database from a farm by using the tools built in to SharePoint Products and Technologies is not supported.

This is because data in these databases may not be synchronized with data in other Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 databases. Therefore, the tools built in to SharePoint Products and Technologies do not recover these databases during a farm-level recovery.

If this data is not synchronized, users might experience various random errors.

So, is there any way I can back up and restore the config database? We were discussing this with a well-known SQL expert Charley Hanania a while ago, and came to a simple thought – if something can be backed up, it must be possible to restore it. It’s the question of understanding the risks and choosing the right tools to mitigate them. If the risk is that SharePoint farm structure information in config database would be not synchronized with other databases, you need a way to make a point-in-time backup of all databases within the farm, ensuring that none of these databases changes during the backup process. How is this possible?

• Obviously, snapshot technologies and products that use them can achieve this functionality. For example, this allows Microsoft Data Protection Manager to back up and restore all SharePoint databases, including configuration db.
• Another supported way to restore all databases suggested on TechNet is to take a backup when the SharePoint farm is offline. Essentially, this means all SharePoint services are stopped across all front end and application servers, and no changes are being made during the backup process. Does not seem feasible for live SharePoint environment? This is where SQL Server’s features such as log shipping or database mirroring can help. Both techniques allow you to create and maintain a copy of SQL database that is not accessed by SharePoint. So working closely with your SQL DBA you can have a “point-in-time” copy of all the farm databases and back them up.

Config db is not the only reason why you can utilize log shipping and/or database mirroring in SharePoint environment. For example, see Mike Watson’s recent presentation decks from Best Practices and SPTech conferences, where he discusses how both options apply to SharePoint environment for high availability and disaster recovery.

Technorati tags:
Data Protection Manager; DPM; disaster recovery; SharePoint; SQL

Joel just anounced the new community site we’re starting here at Quest, SharePoint For All. We will try to use this site to share expertise, Quest product news, ideas, beta versions of new releases and even some research projects! Here you can also get first-hand answers from the product teams – our developers, product managers, consultants, – and of course your peers who may already be using the products.

All this is just getting started, and you can help us define what exactly SharePoint For All will become in the future. I encourage you to register and join the community now and get active on the forums.

The new community site also features the new Quest SharePoint Team blog. One of the recent posts there explains how Quest Recovery Manager for SharePoint fits into various different environments and allows to leverage existing backup infrastructure for granular data recovery. This is a follow up for Joel Oleson’s recent SharePoint backup and recovery webcast (see the recorded webcast here, and Q&A in a separate blog post).

So – watch the new team blog for the product news, and I will try to keep this blog for more generic SharePoint backup and recovery topics.

In case you did not see Todd Klindt’s post about this, he’ll be giving away free copies of the new Inside SharePoint Administration book he wrote together with Shane Young and Steve Caravajal. All you need is subscribe to Todd’s blog and be among the first five to congratulate him on the book availability (see details in Todd’s original post). I’d also recommend you subscribe to Shane’s and Steve’s blogs. Just in case.

Good news for those who are not that lucky is that even purchasing the book you’ll get something for free. Every copy of Inside SharePoint Administration includes a CD with additional material and free evaluation copy of Quest Site Administrator – a great tool for centralized SharePoint administration and reporting. (Usual disclosure: this is one of the products I work on as a member of Quest SharePoint product group.)

BTW, Inside SharePoint Administration is available for pre-order on Amazon if you don’t want to take chances and rather would leverage Amazon’s guaranteed pre-order discount.

[Update, 11/19: The book is available on Amazon now, and Todd's book giveaway is complete. Congrats to the winners, and free evaluation copies of the SharePoint admin tools to the rest of us who purchase the book.]

Technorati Tags:
sharepoint, Quest, sharepoint administration

One of the most influencing minds in the SharePoint world, the most well known SharePoint blogger and evangelist, Joel “SharePoint Joel” Oleson has joined Quest Software. Specifically the SharePoint Product Management team that I am a part of. I am really excited. We met with Joel earlier couple times at TechEd and SharePoint Conference, but now this is a real chance work closer and get a fresh look at the SharePoint offerings protfolio Quest has. The only thing that concerns me is it’s probably going to be quite challenging to get hold of Joel even now, considering all the traveling he is doing over last few years :) but I’ll try my best!

Well, I guess what I am really trying to say here is to repeat Adam’s words: welcome to the team, Joel, and look forward to working with you!

Technorati Tags:
Quest

ICS Solutions, one of the leading IT solution providers and Microsoft Gold Partner in the UK are hosting a one-day SharePoint Showcase conference tomorrow, October 16 at their location in Basingstoke, England. There are about 10 ISV partners coming to the event to talk about their products, and I will be representing Quest Software there together with our Director of Marketing for SharePoint product line.

Sorry for the last minute notice (did not want to post this until I get the UK Visa), but as far as I know ICS has planned this conference to be the first in a series of similar events. Anyway, if you are attending the event tomorrow be sure to come by and say hello, or even better – book the 30-minute one-on-one meeting so that we have a chance to talk.

Technorati Tags:
SharePoint, Quest, conferences

When someone downloads and installs Windows SharePoint Service with the default settings, the install wizard hardly indicates that SQL engine is being used in the back end. Is this a problem for SharePoint admins? And for SQL DBA’s? What happens when SharePoint grows in size and importance for the organization? Do the SQL DBA’s need to think about SharePoint backup and restore?

These were the questions discussed in a recent webcast by David Walker, ASP .Net MVP and specialist in enterprise apps architecture, and David Gugick and Doug Davis from Quest Software, where they are leading Product Management teams for Quest’s SQL and SharePoint product lines.

I missed the webcast but the recording is available for download the recording from Quest website. Although it was primarily meant for SQL Server administrators, it really helps to understand what common problems SharePoint and SQL admins are facing and why it’s so much easier to solve them together.

Technorati Tags:
database, Quest, sharepoint, sql