I’m heading to the SharePoint Technical Conference down in San Francisco tomorrow to do a session on backup and recovery which is a little different than my typical DR talks. This session is more about holistic protection for small installations and I emphasize item-level recovery since this is the most pressing concern of most SharePoint shops. I summarize my session as follows:

•          SharePoint Backup/Recovery is tricky, but not impossible. – There are many options in the backup/recovery space each with their own particular merits and drawbacks. Choosing an effective strategy means wading through these options with your true requirements in mind.

•          Traditional backup/restore is not HA or DR. – Backup/restore methodologies don’t really work for disaster recovery and certainly not for high availability scenarios due to many factors including loss of functionality, incomplete protection of system settings and customizations, and recovery speed.

•          Different requirements sometimes require different solutions. There’s not one solution that meets everyone’s needs. Requirements usually fall into one of three buckets. High Availability, Disaster Recovery, and end-user (item level) recovery. These different areas generally require different solutions and these solutions may interfere with one another.

•          Most solutions have issues. Look around for innovative fixes. – Out-of-the-box tools will have issues, but most often these issues can be addressed using existing workarounds.