The impact of design decisions are of importance during a partial recovery, where only part of the farm needs to be recovered. An example is a corrupted site, or a permanently overwritten document forcing a restore operation. The design has a direct effect on the planned size of content databases. SharePoint farms that evolve through organic growth or by poor design practices can lead to the use of a single, huge site collection, which in turn results in huge content databases. Backing up and restoring huge content databases require excessive time, and the availability of large storage pools.
A common challenge in large farms is not having clear naming standards for all the parts that connect a URL back to a database. The greater the number of databases, the more crucial a clear mapping is for an administrator to be able to quickly and easily determine which database to restore during a recovery operation. If the administrator needs to spend an hour to trace...