Question

What are your disaster recovery plans for Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 ?

Currently we are backuping all databases (1 content, admin, search and config) using sql backup tools, and backuping the front end server via dataprotector.

To test our backups, we use another server farm, restore the content database (following the procedure on technet) and create a new application that uses this database. We just have to redeploy solutions on the newly created sharepoint application.

However, we have to change database access credentials (on sql server) : the user accounts used on production aren’t the same as those used on our ‘test’ farm.

At the end, we can restore our content database and access all our sites. Searching doesn’t work, but we’re investigating.

Is this restore scenario reliable (as in supported by microsoft) ?

Answer 1

You can’t really backup / restore both config database and search database:

• restoring config database only work if your new farm have exactly the same server names
• when you restore the search database, the fulltext index is not synchronize. however, this is not a problem as you can just reindex.

As a result, I would say that yes, this a reliable for content. But take care of:

• You may have to redo some configuration (AAM, managed path…).
• This does not include customization, you want to keep a backup of your solution