Lately – the subject matter of SharePoint and disaster recovery
has been an interesting one which I’ve had several discussions about in my
various SharePoint travels. This is indeed a serious subject that many times is
not thought out, nor planned – nor even tested or accounted for. However – in my
view the opinion should be that as much time is spent in setting up and
architecting a SharePoint site, this same amount of time – should be spent in
thinking about a disaster recovery strategy.
I see two views on this matter – the first is what I will
call the “poor version” of disaster recovery and this involves essentially
backing up and then shipping offsite the SharePoint databases each night. This
plan also would include shipping off the snapshots of the virtual machines as
well – so that a server and database set can be restored if necessary.
The second view and more expensive model involves taking a
back-up each night of the whole entire farm and then having that farms copy of
assets go to a local storage hub as well as offsite. In this model when I’m
talking farm – I mean the whole farm – virtual machines, databases, configurations,
site collections, sites, document libraries and lists, etc. In this model if
someone deletes a whole site – it could be recovered in full – regardless of
the size of the site. Also if someone deletes a library or list it can be
recovered. Additionally a policy under this model could be put in place to have
the data be stored for 90 to 120 days – which would be double the standard 30
day – end user recycle bin and then 30 day administrator recycle bin – that is
currently available.
Thus, this is a broad topic but my goal is short posts to
get you thinking!
