We’ve all been in this situation – after a good long SharePoint based portal implementation – we start scratching our head to figure out what's the best way to back up the SharePoint farm and drown in the multitude of options – SharePoint native backup, stsadm or 3rd party products like AvePoint or EMC.
Now, Microsoft makes our life very easy by announcing Data Protection Manager as the main backup/restore application for SharePoint 2010.
Well, you might think that’s just another one of the many methods to protect SharePoint 2010 but DPM hides under its hood some pretty cool features which make it the #1 backup/restore application for SharePoint 2010. Here are some of them:
- Application Awareness – it is probably one of the most important features of DPM, DPM is aware that it's backing up SharePoint and not any other solution when backing up SharePoint databases. The meaning of this is that DPM works hand in hand with SharePoint and as the result of that the backed up data is more consistent as DPM makes sure that all the transactions that are occurring during the backup are taken into consideration.
- Item Level Recovery – DPM enables to recover a single object out of a full farm backup of a wide variety of SharePoint objects, such as documents, lists, document libraries, sites and sites collections.
- Protects SharePoint Search. In a large farm the search index can get rather big. In these situations - backing up search is crucial as in a case of disaster it could take very long time, even days, to index the farm again.
- Better Performance – DPM runs a very light agent which almost does not affect the farm production environment, with very low I/O, as it scans memory blocks to track changes in real -time.
- Self-Healing Backup Process – during the backup, if one of the backup objects, such as server or database, goes offline – DPM will proceed with the backup as planned and try to self-heal and add the offline object during the next planned backup.
- Reduce Storage Costs – DPM aims to use disks as the main backup storage and tapes for archiving. It's very understandable as disks are cheaper and more common than tapes and it's very easy and quick to restore data from them.
Furthermore, DPM reduces storage costs by minimizing backed up data by backing up only the changed blocks of data, meaning that every backup after the first full backup is approximately 5% (average daily data change on a SharePoint farm) of the whole farm data. That saves about 75% of storage space comparing to differential SharePoint native backup over a one month period. - Search for Content (across Recovery Points). DPM enables to search the backed up data. It's very helpful if we want to perform an item level recovery, DPM search makes it very easy to locate an item to recover when needed and the time factor is crucial.
DPM is a great SharePoint 2010 backup/restore solution. And the fact it comes from Microsoft is a big advantage over other solutions as it integrates well with SharePoint within the backup/restore processes.
It very important to mention that DPM actually is the main Microsoft backup/restore solution for other Microsoft products such as Active Directory, Exchange, SQL, Virtual Server, file shares, System State and more. So it’s a great new backup/restore product family from Microsoft.
For more information – http://www.microsoft.com/dpm
Try it! There's also a 180 days evaluation download.
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