Specifying my disaster recovery and backup policy for sharepoint 2013

Question

I have the following inside our live server:-

1. we have SharePoint server 2013 with enterprise license.
2. the SharePoint is installed inside windows server 2008 R2.
3. we have our sql server 2008 R2 installed inside windows server 2008 R2.

now i have defined the following backup policies:-

1. At the beginning of each day i take a site collection back up using Backup-SP for all our site collections.. so at the end of this stage we have 8 .bak files saved inside our file server(out side the SP server).
2. I also take a farm back up using Backup-SPFarm.

now i though the above will be sufficient,, but as i read about seems if the face these problems, then my above policy will not be sufficient:-

1. if our database server breaks .

2. if our live SharePoint server breaks (hardware failure or OS failure), then i will not be able to benefit from the farm backup.. as if our SP server breaks , and we build a new VM and we install SharePoint server, then restoring the farm inside the new server will not work unless the new server have the same signature as per the damaged server..

so can anyone adivce on how i need to improve my backup policy ? to guarantee that i can bring our SharePoint data back in case the SharePoint , sql or both servers break (severe damage such as hardware failure or OS failure )? Thanks

Answer 1

Disaster Recovery plan depend upon business requirement.

1. First you have to setup your farm with high availability options
   • Load balanced Web front end
   • Redundant Search service server
   • Always-On SQl Server.

High availability is generally used to describe the ability of a system to continue operating and provide resources to its users when a failure occurs in one or more of the following categories in a fault domain: hardware, software, or application. The level of availability is expressed as a measure of the percentage of time that a system is continuously operational to support business functions. The required level of availability varies among organizations. Although this requirement may also vary among business units, a service level agreement is for the organization as a whole. From the perspective of users, a UNRESOLVED_TOKEN_VAL(SharePointAll_1st_NoVer) farm is available when users can access the farm and use the features and services that they must have to do their work.

Create a high availability architecture and strategy for SharePoint 2013

2. To recover from the Backup, this thing required a down time i.e hardware failure on DB server, you need a down time.
   • I would perform Database Backup( all Dbs content, service)
   • documents all the farm configuration( including web.config changes, changes to server)
   • Save a copy of all custom solution deployed to farm.
   • I would backup the farm using backup-spfarm
   • if i can also backup of site collections.

But in above backups, i think you are fine with recover as long as you are ok with down time.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff628971.aspx