Backup, Restore and Disaster Recovery

Gathering Requirements

* RTO - Recovery Time Objective
* RPO - Recovery Point Objective

Content Recovery
    - Less Serious
    - Recycle bin is the best friend
           1) First stage made available to business users
           2) Second stage available to site collection administrators
           3) Recycle bin settings configures in web application
           4) Users can recover deleted Items/ Documents/ Sites
    - Third Party tools like Ave Point (or) Quest can get item level restore
     
Disaster Recovery
   - Its a Big one
   - If entire Data Center is down,
            1) Data center synchronization via Log shipping is one method
            2) Stand by farm in remote location and wit Log shipping you can easily recover simply by                                flipping the switch. (DNS Headers, IP's Info  etc)
            3) DB Mirroring is another method, basically it takes a mirror image of your environment                                  and run simultaneously on your recovery farm.
High Availability
  - Expect problem and plan for up time
  - Doubling up the servers so that if one goes down we have other
  - Most effective focus on SQL Server databases
             1) Database Mirroring
             2) Database Clustering
             3) Transaction log shipping

Backing Up SharePoint Content
  - Two Common Strategies
            1) Backup site collection - SharePoint backups
                   i) Backup-SPSite/ Restore-SPSite
                       *** Can lead to performance issues with 1GB or more
                   ii) Export-SPWeb/ Import-SPWeb
                   iii) Export-SPList/ Import-SPList
       Power Shell Script: Backup all the site collections to "C:\backups"
                Get-SPWebApplication |Get-SPSite | 
                 ForEach-Object{
                     $FilePath = "C:\Backups" + $_.Url.Replace("http://","").Replace("/","-") + ".bak"
                     Backup-SPSite -Identity $_Url -Path $FilePath
                     }
                   iv) Granular backup - Sitecollection/ Web/ List
            2) Backup content databases - SQL backups
                    i) SQL Server backup/ restore tools are very mature
                    ii) Provides efficient means to recover content
 
DR: Server failure - Farm
  - Decide what to back up
          1) Content Databases
          2) Configuration Database
          3) Service Application databases
DR: Server failure - Server
  - Files
         1) Solution Packages
         2) Webtemp.xml
         3) Docicon.xml and file icons
         4) SSL Certificates
         5) Web.config
         6) Configuration from IIS metabase
         7) Registry Keys
  - Folders
        1) \15 hive
        2) \14 hive
        3) \inetpub
        4) \install
In addition, system level files
%windir%\System32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe add backup "My Backup Name"
%windir%\System32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe restore backup "My Backup Name"
%windir%\System32\inetsrv\history

DR: Server failure - Farm Backup
SharePoint Supports Farm Level backup