I remember my first SharePoint administration work. When I started at Southern Wine as a DBA, I had a ton of application databases to manage, and one of them was a SharePoint database. The Project Management Office had started using SharePoint Services to hold stuff, and they’d really started piling it on – documents, project plans, pictures, you name it, all stored in SQL Server. It made me cringe – files don’t belong in the database, I said. It was too late, though.
I just backed it up like any other application database: full backups nightly, transaction logs every 15 minutes, made the Sign of the Cross when I walked past the server, the usual stuff. (I’m a recovering Catholic.)
One day, it happened. Somebody called to say they’d deleted a document out of SharePoint and they needed it back immediately.
I’m a DBA. I think of recovery in terms of databases, tables and rows. If somebody says they deleted a row, usually they’re a developer, and they know things like the exact database and table name, plus the primary key of the record. I restore the database to another location, pull the row out via a query, and insert it into the live production database. Emergency solved.
SharePoint, that’s another animal entirely. The user is just a panicked end user, nothing more, who says things like, “I can’t remember exactly what the document was called, but it’s the one that’s gone now! Go find it!”
Awww, man, come on…
More and more, more of us DBAs are getting stuck in this situation. We’re being told that SharePoint is ours to manage, ours to back up and most painfully, ours to recover when something goes wrong. To prepare for that, Joel Oleson (aka SharepointJoel.com) and I are doing a webcast on February 19th called Effective Backup and Restore Strategies for Your SharePoint Service. We’re going to cover how to go from chaos to smooth sailing using the native tools as well as Quest’s SharePoint stuff like Recovery Manager.
Joel does the same thing at Quest Software that I do, except he’s in the SharePoint team. He’s well-known in the SharePoint world, he’s writing an upcoming O’Reilly book on SharePoint, and he’s on Twitter as JoelOleson.
You can register for the SharePoint backup & recovery webcast, and if that one sounds interesting to you, we’ve got several other upcoming SharePoint webcasts as well. You can find ‘em on the Quest Events list – choose SharePoint in the Technologies dropdown box. You can also switch to the Webcast Archives tab and view a bunch of past webcasts we’ve done on SharePoint.
