Backups are an important part of designing and maintaining a SharePoint Server environment. The ability to backup and recover data is integral to many business processes, such as the following instances:
- Recovering or restoring accidentally or maliciously deleted content
- Platform or service upgrades
- Migrating between infrastructure solutions
- Recovering from failed upgrades
- Recovering from unexpected system failures or disasters
Natively, SharePoint Server supports the following backup designs:
- Farm
- Granular
- Configuration only
Let's examine these backup designs in more detail.
Farm
In a farm backup scenario, you'll be targeting backing up major components of the farm. The farm backup architecture is initiated from Central Administration and launches a SQL Server backup of content and service application databases. It also saves configuration content to files and backs up the Search index data.
A SharePoint farm backup supports...