MOSS 2007 SP3 update recovery

Question

We are planning to update our MOSS 2007 Enterprise SP2 environment to SP3. I wanted to know a rollback strategy that we should plan just in case our update fails. Although we will doing this update in test environment first, but still. Can we just take the DB backups of all content, my sites and central admin DBs and restore them just in case we face any issues?

Answer 1

Backups are probably your best option, given that there isn't a way to uninstall a SharePoint patch, but you should keep a few things in mind:

• Make sure you know what version your farm is on when you take the backups, and that you have the files available to rebuild a replacement farm to exactly that patch level. You may be able to restore older backups into a newer farm but that's getting more and more difficult as the products evolve.
• Keep in mind that you'll need to do a full rebuild of the farm and then restore those content databases to the new farm, so it is important to capture how you have the farm configured so you can build a new farm to match the old one.
• The content databases are the main thing you'll want to target for backups. If you're doing SQL Server database backups, Microsoft does not support restoring configuration databases from SQL Server backups.

John