Introduction
It is no surprise that SharePoint brings more than US$2 billion to Microsoft annually from tens of thousands of businesses and tens of millions of users. According to a Radicati Group study, Microsoft SharePoint continues to see strong market adoption across all verticals and is projected to grow 20 percent annually. Despite the growth of the cloud, 74 percent of companies continue to use on-premise versions of SharePoint.
Just like your email, databases, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems, SharePoint is a business application that you must include in your server and data protection plan in order to minimize risks of losing critical data. However, SharePoint’s scalability and multiple deployment options can make designing a backup plan challenging.
Microsoft SharePoint Backup and Data Protection
SharePoint lets users share files using folders on network shares while providing robust, role- based access control and collaboration capabilities.
SharePoint is extremely scalable and can support many member roles. At a minimum, a SharePoint server will use a Microsoft SQL Server database server and a Web Front End (WFE) server.
To protect your entire SharePoint farm, you should create complete disk-imaging backups of every SharePoint member server, as well as SQL Database Server (including the database). Remember to choose the backup solution that is SQL-aware, and supports database quiescing and log truncation.
SharePoint Recovery
Having complete disk images means that if a single member of your SharePoint environment fails, you can restore it in case of malfunction. You can also restore the database in case of data corruption or loss.
In addition to complete recoveries, your backup solution should also support granular recoveries of individual documents from SharePoint farms.
It is also important to have an option to recover to dissimilar hardware, as you never know what hardware you will have for recovery. You may even need to restore to a virtual machine in your datacenter, or in a cloud, such as Azure or Amazon.
Multi-Tenant SharePoint
SharePoint supports a one-to-many relationship between the database server role and other roles, which means that a single database server can serve multiple SharePoint instances.
This lets you deliver SharePoint as a service in a cost-effective manner. Remember to include every member server into your backup plan to ensure success of complete recovery in case of disaster.
Acronis Backup 12
Small businesses protect all their data — anytime, anywhere — with Acronis Backup 12, the world’s fastest and easiest hybrid cloud data protection solution. Built on Acronis Hybrid Cloud Architecture, Acronis backs up your data two times faster than the closest competitor and delivers extraordinary 15-second RTOs (Recovery Time Objectives).
With support for 16 distinct platforms, Acronis Backup protects your data in on-premise and remote systems, in private and public clouds, and on mobile devices.
Acronis Backup simplifies the management of data protection, reduces IT manual efforts, and improves efficiency with innovative features that automate data protection. These features include a zero-installation, unified touch-friendly web console; agentless and agent-based backups; and flexible granular, bare-metal, and dissimilar hardware recovery options.
Acronis Backup 12 includes comprehensive support of Microsoft SharePoint backup. You can back up entire servers with award-winning disk-imaging technology. For your SQL server, the solution will quiesce the database and truncate the transaction logs. You can store your backups on local storage, such as NAS (Network Attached Storage) and SAN (Storage Area Network), and use reliable and secure cloud backup with Acronis Cloud Storage.
You can recover your member servers to same or dissimilar hardware – even to virtual machines on-premises or in Azure or Amazon cloud. Moreover, with Acronis Instant Restore you can do it in less than 15 seconds!
You can also recover your database in multiple recovery modes, and perform granular recovery of individual documents from your SharePoint hierarchy.
Summary
Microsoft SharePoint is one of the most popular content management systems on the market: for many companies, it is one of their most important information systems.
Prolonged SharePoint downtime is costly and, in many cases, is not acceptable. Companies of any size that are heavily reliant on SharePoint must implement a SharePoint server and data backup plan that assures the availability of vital SharePoint resources in the shortest amount of time.
Acronis offers dependable backup solutions for SharePoint. Protect your SharePoint environment with Acronis Backup and minimize SharePoint downtime with little-to-no upfront costs.