I have created a new SharePoint 2007 MOSS Intranet. Our admin people are purchasing backup/restore software and I will eventually have to verify a restore of the farm backup they create. Has anyone got some suggestions on a best practice for this? Ours is a small 2-server farm built with VMWare VMs on SAN. How will I know that the restored version is a duplicate of the original in every way and what should I look out for?
+3
A:
In answer to the remarks:
There's no checklist. The problem is the dynamic nature of SharePoint. Team Sites come and go, as do documents and libraries. Who's to say one of your users didn't delete a document library and then you think after a restore something is missing.
I think the best bet would be to require your users to do a quick scan after a restore, see if they miss anything major, like sites or libraries that are supposed to be there. You yourself could have a "homemade" checklist that you follow to check if all major features deployed by you (features, timerjobs etc.) are still there.
Colin
2009-07-03 06:27:28
Thanks for your input Colin (+1 and marked as answer). I'd like to make the point though that the site is locked down during a backup/restore (either manually with setsitelock, or automatically depending on which patch is applied), so nobody is adding anything. I still think that this is being overlooked as a serious admin consideration and there is a need for either a tool and/or process to guarantee the fidelity of the restore - should not need 3rd party software for something as basic as this :-)
IrishChieftain
2009-07-06 16:58:46