Joel’s SharePoint Backup and Restore Q&A
Joel published Q&A section from his Backup/Restore WebCast, which I recommend to read there. The most important things from that webcast and Q&A are:
- SQL Cluster does not work in a VMWare Environment. Will be working in future versions of vmWare.
- SQL Replication is not supported to synchronize databases in SharePoint, albeit some vendors have “replication” solutions, like Infonic and Synergy.
- Microsoft doesn’t support replica for SharePoint database synchronizations.
- vmWare clone is good for recovery & snapshot is for backups.
- The easiest way to restore a site is with Quest Recovery Manager.
- Avoid shrinking the transaction log whenever possible.
- Quest Recovery Manager does recovery only, not backups.
- STSADM does NOT export/import lists. Need to use Quest Recovery Manager, object model such as content migration API, or STSADM extensions.
July 20, 2009@ 3:06 pm
Hi Joel- very impressive blog.
About backup, say I have a 3 server farm (2 WFEs and dbserver) and I take a vmware snapshot of the WFEs to use as a backup
There will be a time difference (very little maybe) between 2 snapshots of the WFEs.Wouldn”t reverting back to those snapshots make the 2 WFEs out of sync with each other and the database server?
What do you think?
-Shah
July 20, 2009@ 5:25 pm
Nope, there is no issues with WFE sync, because it gets all data from database and nothing will be lost.
WFE doesn”t store data and nothing to lose.
There is a small issue with snapshots of database server – becase DB can be unsyncronized between snapshots