SharePoint 2010 Backup and Restore

SharePoint Server 2010 Backup and Restore

SharePoint 2010 Backups are a major advance over the backup facilities in SharePoint 2007. SharePoint can now easily maintain full backups and even granular backups, where only selected data can be restored. For this article I will demonstrate how to use PowerShell to backup and restore SharePoint applications as well as the standard the SharePoint web interface.
Content Database Recovery
In SharePoint 2007, my preference for SharePoint backup  was to perform a database backup. It was easy to maintain and backup/restore over many SharePoint farms, and it needed little administrative work in case when I had to move the sites to different farms, or restore broken farms to new hardware. To the experienced SharePoint administrator, with the content databases only, it didn’t take long to restore the content. But the real disadvantage of SharePoint backup via database backup was not in the hard recovery, where you had to deal with the entire server failures – the pain was recovering a single file from a document library that was accidentally deleted. The only way to recover that file using the database backups, was to fully restore it on different farm, attach it to any temporary SharePoint site and browse to the file to restore it from the library. Now this is no longer an issue, since we have Unattached Content Database Recovery.
Unattached Content Database Recovery allows you to browse through the content database using SharePoint, navigate to a list or document library and save the list or library into .cmp file which can easily be moved between sites.

Unattached Content Database Recovery

To be able to use this feature, you simply need to attach the content database backup with a different name to a SQL server instance and then use the screen (shown above) to retrieve any content from the attached database backup. You do not need to attach that database to any site inside a farm anymore. This feature is a part of the Granular Backup functionality in SharePoint. You can store that way entire content databases using MS SQL management tools or decide to backup only the site collection.
Backup and Restore feature
The stsadm powered backup and restore features from SharePoint 2007 are still here, but they have changed and now they can be helpful rather than painful for the administrator.

Backup in Central Administration

Central Administration now checks if the required services are running and gives the choice to backup the entire farm, or only selected applications or services.
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