SharePoint Backup and Recovery

Backup Elite SC V 3.0
Backup Elite SC V 3.0 is a lightweight utility that automates Microsoft's Stsadm and Smigrate tools. Backup Elite has a SharePoint Portal Server mode and a Windows Share-Point Services mode but works only with site collections, not portal areas. Available as a download, it's easy to install. Most of the screens are informational only, and you can change the installation path.

The Administration Tool has six tabs, as Figure 5 shows. The Settings tab holds all environment settings the application needs. Using this tab, you can create a backup job for stsadmn.exe and smigrate.exe with the appropriate switches and variables. The Backup tab is for manual backups of sites and subsites. The Restore tab lets you restore, create, delete, and move sites, subsites, lists, list items, document libraries, and documents. Using the Migrate tab, you can migrate single or multiple sites with a few clicks while maintaining site users, groups, and permissions. The Tools tab lets you easily create and delete sites and subsites, and the Logs tab displays current dynamic log information and lets you retrieve details from log files.

The Settings tab is intuitive, except for the Restore Path field, which the documentation doesn't mention. Be careful what you enter here; the restoration process creates sites in this path. I put my portal path here and then later overwrote my portal.

Selecting the Date Time Stamps check box keeps you from overwriting your backup files. The Backup Sub Sites Individually check box enables granular restores of subsites but also increases the size of your backups, since you're storing backups of your subsites in addition to site collections. Backup Sub Sites Individually forces enumeration of all subsites when the product is building the command lines for running stsadm.exe. Even if you don't use this feature, any new site collections are enumerated at runtime and backed up.

You use the Schedule Tasks Wizard to automate scheduled backups. To prune old backup files, you need to select which day of the week pruning will be done from the Delete Date/Time Stamp Backup Files Every drop-down list at the bottom of the Settings tab. I found no way to disable pruning. I suppose if you want to save more than a week's worth of files, you can relocate them. When you're doing restorations, a browse option helps you find the relocated files.

Backup Elite is easy to use and helpful for managing day-to-day chores such as recovering deleted items or restructuring your sites. It would also be useful in staging a SharePoint implementation from development to test to production. In just a few minutes of playing around, I was able to restore individual files to a document library. I also copied (migrated) one top-level site collection from my portal to a subsite in another site collection.

As I mentioned earlier, however, I also destroyed my portal by configuring the Restore Path field incorrectly. The site collections still worked, but my portal disappeared. I advise running Spsbackup before playing with Backup Elite in a test environment.

I also learned that restoring a complete list or document library deletes the current object, replacing it with the old (restored) object. Backup Elite would be better (and safer) if it let you restore individual items without overwriting existing ones.

Backup Elite doesn't touch any of the file system or IIS settings. To back up those items, you need a file-system and systemstate backup product. You also need to run Spsbackup to back up your SharePoint Portal databases and areas. Restoring indexes from Spsbackup fails on anything other than a small farm. Backup Elite is obviously designed for small shops and could fill a niche there as long as other backup solutions are in place for the OS, the file system, and SQL Server.

The Best of the 4
Each solution I tested provides unique capabilities that you might find useful, depending on your needs. (You might also consider the real-time document recovery options in the sidebar "Real-Time Document Recovery.") Of the four SharePoint backup and recovery solutions I tested, one product stands out: Galaxy Backup & Recovery. Its many backup options earned it the Editors' Choice award.

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