Backup / Restore and Data Protection Manager 2007 RTM
DPM 2007 has RTMed! This means there are now more ways to backup and protect your farm.
I was on an internal field call (Academy Live) and Live Meeting yesterday with the DPM Product Managers doing a presentation on using DPM 2007 to protect your SharePoint Farm. There's some fantastic work done by the DPM team to really simplify backups for WSS and MOSS.
I've seen the draft of their SharePoint focused whitepaper which will be coming out soon in addition to some info around the SSP and recovering your indexes.
For more on DPM check out their DPM blog and the DPM Microsoft.com site. Be sure to look at for the DPM 2007 version which is the one that supports backup for Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint.
The gist of DPM 2007 is faster backups using the VSS snapshot provider that SharePoint provides to backup the farm. The copy on write technology can backup your farm as frequently as you want and then allow you to do either farm restores, database restores, or granular restores on a recovery farm.
MS IT has been using DPM 2007 pre RTM to backup their Asia farm with great success, their plans are to slowly replace their current backup solutions with DPM 2007 and I expect Mike Watson and/or Bill Baer to be blogging about it when they do.
The other big thing around backup restore is the recent whitepaper just posted to TechNet. It is THE most comprehensive backup/restore paper out there. The backup chapter in the Administrator's companion is pretty good too, but this one really spends a lot of time on restore which has been the gotcha for some customers. I'm sure you've heard me say it, but let me say it again. Test, test, test your restores. You have to have some process that tells you that backups were successful, not just to disk, but to whatever media you're going to after that. Next you must regularly test your recovery whether you are doing datacenter failover with logshipping, mirroring, or some third party solution. Don't just expect it will work, cause I'd suggest that it nearly always takes longer than you expected, and many times the tapes are bad, the disks that you were backing up to were bad or failed along with the disks your data was on and the ops guys are scrambling for documentation.
So here it is. Data protection and recovery for Office SharePoint Server. Don't let the title undersell this paper. It is the most comprehensive restore paper/info out there. If you want to challenge this, please do so in the comments and let us know what's better. I shared some quick thoughts on the 40 page paper in a post on the SharePoint Team blog.
