SharePoint Backup and Recovery

DocAve 3.1 and SPDR 1.0
AvePoint's SharePoint backup and restore solution comprises two products. DocAve backs up and restores SharePoint data, and SharePoint Disaster Recovery (SPDR) provides disaster recovery for SharePoint databases.

DocAve. Installation of DocAve was over before I realized that I'd answered all the questions. The entire process required only eight clicks, including accepting the license agreement. At the initial launch, I configured the user accounts. Configuration was simple because the product is designed from a SharePoint perspective and presents data in its SharePoint structure. The application found my SharePoint installation and also let me update its structure tree.

The Manager console has panes for backup plans (i.e., backup jobs), restore jobs, and messages, as Figure 3 shows. The Main Toolbar interacts with the selected backup plan or restore job and lets you easily access management functions, such as creating new jobs and starting, pausing, and stopping jobs, from both drop-down menus and icons.

Creating a new backup plan or restore job brings up a browse window, which presents a tree view of your site. You can select the entire object level with all folders included or excluded. After you complete your selections, you can run the job manually or schedule and save the job. You can schedule jobs to run at any time. Backup jobs, once defined, can be scheduled to run either as full or incremental backups. By default, restore jobs run as soon as you save them, although you can schedule them to run later.

You can restore objects to the original location or another location. You must create the destination Virtual Server in IIS and extend it manually with SharePoint before you can apply restorations. Backing up and restoring site information at all levels is intuitive. By right-clicking an object, you can choose to include or exclude items below that level.

You can also create Pruning rules for your backup data so that you don't retain backups forever on disk. You can create these rules as a default for all backup sets or individually for each backup job. Job-level rules override default rules.

DocAve is available in two versions: site level and item level. I used the item-level version, which lets you choose to restore anything from an entire site collection down to individual documents or list items. DocAve doesn't support SharePoint Portal Server areas, just site collections embedded in the Portal content database or Windows Share-Point Services standalone site collections.

SPDR. SPDR provides disaster recovery for multiple SharePoint environments across your network. Installing SPDR is almost as simple as installing DocAve, although you need to install server and client components separately. You install the server first; it requires Windows 2000 or later. Each SPDR installation has just one SPDR server. An extra installation step appears if you need to change the communications port used for client/server communications.

You install the client on each member of your farm and on your SQL Server system. Each client should have at least 1GB of RAM and 3GB of available disk space for a temporary work area. To enable SQL Server database replication and backup, the client system needs to have available three times the disk space occupied by your SQL Server databases, because SPDR can't use remote disk space. The SQL Server client works with both SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000.

SPDR's management interface, which Figure 4 shows, is Web based, so it's accessible from any system that has an Internet connection. The interface doesn't require IIS, but comes with its own Web server, which uses default port 8080. As you click on each client, there's a slight delay while the client updates the server with requested information. You'll need to disable your pop-up blocker for the SPDR site, which operates as a pop-up window. I learned the hard way not to close the original (main) window even though nothing appears there!

SPDR provides a graphical interface to accomplish tasks, such as log shipping between SQL Server systems, that might otherwise require a DBA working with SQL Server Enterprise Manager. SPDR's main features include full (scheduled or realtime) replication of SharePoint databases to a file system or directly to a standby SQL Server system; a strong packet-level fault tolerance transfer protocol to ensure fullfidelity data replication over any network; point-and-click SQL Server replication and disaster recovery; minimal downtime during disaster recovery; and centralized administration with a Web interface to manage monitoring, replication, and management across your SharePoint enterprise.

The AvePoint solution. The combination of DocAve and SPDR makes backup and restoration of SharePoint data quick and easy with a graphical interface that eliminates the need for in-depth SQL Server training. From a pure SharePoint data recovery scenario, AvePoint's solution would make a strong runner-up for Editors' Choice.

The solution's weakness is the lack of complete disaster recovery from the file system, including custom files and binaries, system state, and IIS virtual server level. If you already have server backup and recovery solutions in place through another product, such as Backup Exec, DocAve and SPDR would be an excellent choice to support day-to-day recovery of individual Share-Point components. Combining DocAve and SPDR with Backup Exec would make daytoday tasks simple to configure and execute and would let you recover deleted documents, document libraries, or sites without having to resort to a complete recovery.

Currently, SPDR for disaster recovery and DocAve for granular recovery use different management interfaces. AvePoint plans to integrate the products in the next version, which will also permit drag and drop restoration of sites, subsites, lists, document libraries, and items.

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