I'm curious to hear from the community.  SharePoint's backup and restore capabilities leave obvious gaps. There are an increasing number of products that address these gaps and offer interesting functionality regarding backup and restore.

What products are out there, and what is the community's experience with them?

NOTE!!!!  I will be moderating this forum. While I'm definitely interested in hearing from vendors as well, please don't just post all your product specs and PDF-like information. Instead, carry on a human discussion.  Also, I really want to hear from those of you who use the products. If you've had great experiences, share them. If you've had poor experiences, share those too.  Just please be civil and professional--I have low tolerance for "flames" :-)

---

Dan Holme
Office & SharePoint Pro Community Leader
MVP (Windows Server - Directory Services)

I recently tested, purchased and installed AvePoint's DocAve 4.1 Enterprise solution.  The product worked well in my testing but I found the interface to be rather crude and the documentation lacking detail.  All in all I would rate this product as average.  It works but it isn't pretty ...

 

Thanks for the info. I had read about their product but never heard of anyone using it.

We had a demo of the following product:
http://www.quest.com/recovery-manager-for-sharepoint/Features_Benefits.aspx

To us the most important criteria was a simple restore solution. The backup itselfe is just a common MS SQL Backup.

The demo of this product was conclusive and also our tests with the trial version.

Hi Dan,

I work for one of the vendors already mentioned here on this thread, Quest. I a product manager for our granular SharePoint item level restore product, Quest Recovery Manager for SharePoint. Since you asked no PDFs here, I'll try to explain why we actually bothered to start development of this product :-)

What I hear from the field is that without third-party products, recovery of deleted sites or individual documents takes several business days. The complete disaster recovery is pretty well covered in SharePoint (well, with some gotchas, like you have to remember to backup the 12 hive for any customizations, and IIS metabase, etc.) But when it comes to restoring a document, or a site, it becomes a tough task.Often, SharePoint admins have to get the database backup from tape, restore the database file into test/staging SharePoint environment, where they can then give user access to browse through sites in search of particular document.

An alternative to full database restore into a staging environment is additional backup of site collections with STSADM.exe. It is easier to restore a single site collection instead of re-attaching the SQL database. But in this case you essentially have the same data in 2 different backups, not really good, especially if you have to store historical backups.

So, in Recovery Manager for SharePoint we tried to address these two problems:

• Allow item-level recovery from full SQL backups of SharePoint content databases. And to restore a document (or a list, or a site) you don't need to restore the entire database, we will get only the data you need from the backup.
  
• Make our best to help IT administrator quickly address user requests for SharePoint data recovery. We find new backups automatically, and pre-index them so you don't have to know where to look for the backup file. After that you can browse or search through the backup contents, locate the search results in SharePoint hierarchy, etc.
  

 

Sorry for the long response - but you understand I can talk about this for hours :-) I will be obviously keen to hear any feedback or answer questions here (or in your comments in my blog at http://blog.sharepoint-recovery.com).

Thanks!
Ilia 

Hi, Dan, thanks for publishing the forum on this topic!

To join Ilya’s vendor commentary on this forum, I’d like to provide some notes about AvePoint’s product – DocAve.  Very often our products get compared and we all pride ourselves on providing granular, full-fidelity item-level restore capabilities.

The major difference between Quest backup solution and AvePoint’s DocAve is that Quest provides recovery from SQL backups, DocAve however allows you to run its own granular backup jobs. There are benefits to both.  SQL admins do run SQL backups and it is useful to utilize existing backup jobs, but for many organizations, however, it may not address SLA’s Recovery Point Objectives (data loss) and storage issues as well as desired.

DocAve is unique in allowing a granular backup capability in addition to a granular restore.

For example, if you have a department that can only tolerate 1 hour data loss for their site and important documents, then with SQL backup you will need to back up your entire database every hour. This can clearly cause serious storage and performance issues.  With DocAve you can build and schedule backup plans based on your specific requirements.  It allows you to backup critical areas of your SharePoint environment more frequently, and also allow you to optimally leverage existing tiered storage capabilities within your organization, as each plan can be backed up to different media devices.

We have posted a white paper that describes business importance of granular backup, which you can find here:  http://www.avepoint.com/assets/sharepoint_whitepapers/Can-SharePoint-backup-harm-your-business.pdf .

Also, want to let the reader know about the recovery functionality that is only available in DocAve (and completely integrated with the backup above, but can be purchased separately) is our Platform Recovery module – it provides up-to-the minute platform recovery in case of a disaster. It enables SharePoint Administrators to backup and recover the ENTIRE SharePoint platform, including web applications, content databases, search and index servers, and front-end server/file systems. It backs up SQL logs during the normal backup process and restores using log files for point-in-time content recovery.

Other SharePoint backup options (both AvePoint OEM deals):

-          If you are using IBM Tivoli – IBM TSM for SharePoint completely integrates DocAve for document recovery.

-          If you are using NetApp – NetApp SnapManager for SharePoint (SMMOSS) provides snapshot of the environment and still allows for granular item restore (also OEM’ed DocAve for this solution).

To try out the functionality (that also applies to IBM TSM and NetApp backup solutions for SharePoint) all three, you can simply download a free trial – fully functional for ALL DocAve modules for 30 days:  http://www.avepoint.com/download/

Since mentioned in one of the forums, here are a few facts about AvePoint: AvePoint is completely dedicated to SharePoint; has been around since 2001; has over 2000 customers, many of them are Fortune 500; and has OEM agreements with IBM and NetApp.  Our backup solutions mentioned above are modules of our integrated platform of complete SharePoint back-end management and administration products, which also include archiving, replication, administration, migration, and compliance solutions. All these fully integrated software solutions are part of the DocAve platform and interface, and can be purchased both as a suite and independently.

Thank you,
Inna

Hi Inna,

Is the level of recoverability you described below also a function of the NetApp SnapManager?

Thanks,
John

igordin:

Also, want to let the reader know about the recovery functionality that is only available in DocAve (and completely integrated with the backup above, but can be purchased separately) is our Platform Recovery module – it provides up-to-the minute platform recovery in case of a disaster. It enables SharePoint Administrators to backup and recover the ENTIRE SharePoint platform, including web applications, content databases, search and index servers, and front-end server/file systems. It backs up SQL logs during the normal backup process and restores using log files for point-in-time content recovery.

Hi John, thanks for your question! Current version of SMMOSS supports item-level level recovery. Platform-level recovery will be available in SMMOSS 2.0, due out later this year.

Thank you!
Inna