4. Farm Backup and Restore
SharePoint provides complete SharePoint farm
backup, using Central Administration. SharePoint also allows for
complete backup and restore of the farm using PowerShell.
Up to now, I have discussed backup of content.
Of course, content is vitally important because it is the user data of
a system that gives the system its value, and contributes to the
running of the business for which the organization employs the system.
But now that I am discussing farm backup, more than just content has to
be considered—for example, system configuration settings. When faced
with a total disaster and system loss, the IT team and administrators
want to get a new system online as quickly as possible. Unfortunately,
SharePoint, like most other enterprise systems today, has a
considerable number of configuration options, and no administrator
wants to reconfigure a virgin SharePoint farm installation, from the
ground up, under the pressure of disaster recovery. Fortunately, the
features in SharePoint 2013 that provide for complete farm backup allow
for configuration backup. I shall discuss configuration backup and
restore as part of farm backup.
In the following sections, I shall walk you
through backup via the Central Administration browser interface, and
then I shall cover PowerShell backup and restore commands.
Farm Backup Settings
Before you begin your first SharePoint farm backup, you should first visit the settings page, as follows:
- Open Central Administration.
- Click on the Backup and Restore heading link.
- Click the Configure Backup Settings link.
- SharePoint displays a page for you to configure the number of
threads for backup and restore, and a directory location (UNC path) to
store farm backup files (Figure 6).
- The default of three threads is fine for most purposes.
- Provide a UNC path for the backup directory because the timer
service (which performs the backups) may not have the same drive
mappings as your current user context.
“Threads,” in computer terms, much like the
threads in clothing, consist of granular processing in the overall
application process life cycle. The CPU in the server slices time given
to threads in a process to give the illusion of multi-threading or
multiple things happening at once. Modern CPUs consist of multiple
cores, which can process separate threads of a process at the same time
(true multi-threading). Backup and restore operations work well with
multi-threading because each thread dedicated to a CPU core may run
independent backup and restore operations, thus providing for a more
efficient backup and restore, which by its very nature is a timely
process.
