Creating a disaster recovery policy for SP2010

Question

I'm working on creating a SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Server disaster recovery (and backup-restore) policy for our organization. From what I've read, there are several options for doing backup-restore:

• Central Administration backup and restore
• PowerShell backup and restore
• Recycle Bin restore
• SQL Server db backup + restore

We're thinking of creating a PowerShell script that can run hourly to do differential backups and daily full backups of SharePoint. Is this a good approach? Are there scripts to do this? Thank you :)

Answer 1

You can configure Schedule Task, which is feature in Windows Server 2008 and then execute this PowerShell code: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/9b99c435-8831-4c9e-a70b-1f13158ef22a

Or http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/how-to-sql-server-databases-backup-with-powershell.aspx

You must document your Disaster Recovery plan carefully and you will then need to list all of components. Remember that your backup/restore plan is just a part of Disaster Recovery.

This article provides an overview of 10 step to do DR.

You can also learn the reference that is mentioned by Chakkaradeep Chandran.

Answer 2

Creating a DR plan for SharePoint depends a lot on the business needs. I would first start off with defining what my RPO and RTO are. Based on that, next is to design it.

A very basic plan that many follow is SQL Mirroring with Log Shipping. To optimise the performance, the backups can be performed from the mirrored sql server.

Dpending on your business needs, you can stand up a warm or hot stand-by farm.

Make sure you read this guide - Business continuity management for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 which provides in-depth information about back and recovery plans with PowerShell scripts.

Hope that helps.

Cheers, Chaks