What this book covers

Chapter 1, Planning and Key Concepts – What Not to Forget, is an introduction to SharePoint DR, how to approach the subject, and key concepts related to the subject. In this chapter, we will learn to identify the Disaster Recovery (DR) scenarios within SharePoint and its associated technology stack. It also covers inheriting a mission-critical environment that has no existing DR plans. It will highlight the traditional disaster recovery problem: the battle between cost and speed. It will enable us to think in terms of service disruptions versus disasters.

Chapter 2, Creating, Testing, and Maintaining the DR plan, explains how to test and maintain a SharePoint environment, so that the administrator has the ability to confidently say there is a solid DR plan in place. It explains how to identify all of the components and threats of your SharePoint environment. It includes a detailed explanations of how to create, test, and maintain your Disaster Recovery plan.

Chapter 3, Physical Backup and Restore Procedures, covers the backup and restore procedures for an on-premise environment that are available to an administrator, and explains their pros and cons. What is instrumental about this chapter is that it makes you think about what approach is appropriate to your individual implementation. This chapter discusses system state data backup, the partitioning of data, and the loss of data in Windows Server 2012. It also covers system database backups and restores, third-party database backups and restores, and point-in-time backups and restores.

Chapter 4, Virtual Environment Backup and Restore Procedures, covers backup and restore options for a virtual environment that are available to an administrator, and explains their pros and cons. What is instrumental about this chapter is that it makes you think about what approach is appropriate to your individual implementation. The topics covered in this chapter are Hyper V and VMware, backup and restore, Snapshots, and Failover clustering.

Chapter 5, Central Administration and Other Native Backup and Restore Options, lists the out-of-the-box SharePoint backup and restore methods, and their pros and cons. In this chapter, we will learn how to perform farm recovery by using a farm backup created with built-in tools. This chapter also explains component recovery using the farm backup system. It also highlights data recovery from an unattached content database and site collection recovery from a site collection backup.

Chapter 6, Working with Data Sizing and Data Structure, introduces you to the impact that data sizes may have no recovering SharePoint data and structure. This chapter will help you understand the data sizing architectural choices within a SharePoint environment. It explains how to work with very large amounts of data for recovery purposes. It also explains how to architect a SharePoint topology with Disaster Recovery in mind.

Chapter 7, Disaster Recovery with Custom Development, explains how to implement a solid DR strategy for custom development environments. In this chapter, you will become familiar with SharePoint development and understand its challenges. It also shows the steps needed to provide a recovery plan for customizations.

Chapter 8, Disaster Recovery Techniques for End Users, lists a number of recipes that the end user can introduce to their SharePoint activity in order to protect their own data. This chapter highlights points such as why training is often forgotten, some useful end user DR practices, managing expectations, and training.

Chapter 9, In the Clouds, demonstrates that SharePoint in the cloud is the talk of the town for most CIOs/CTOs, but the topic of conversation is normally security of data, rather than DR. This is partly because the media focuses on data security breaches, rather than site availability. Cloud DR is an important topic and should not be overlooked.

Chapter 10, Where to Start, wraps up the topics in the book and attempts to give the knowledge obtained from the book some sticking power to the reader.

The Appendix includes some horror stories of what went wrong and what should have been done, how and why assumptions can sink a DR plan, and best practices to keep a plan operational.