Backing up and/or restoring a single shared document

[scp1973]

I have inherited responsibility for Sharepoint here at work, and I know very little. But here is my problem:

We have many shared documents. My boss wants to be able to backup all documents and restore individual documents as needed. I can't seem to find out how to do this.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Steve

 

[ouzojd]

You will need to either get a 3rd party app such as commvault or docave or you will need to restore an entire site or portal to another server and get the file from there. No easy answer for that one sorry.

 

[Thomas2000]

Hello,

as ouzojd says, a 3rd party product will take care of item-level backups. If you use stsadm.exe to do your site backups, only way to restore "single" documents or libraries would be to restore the entire site to an alternate location and from there, via webfolders (through a networkplace or explorer view) manually copy the documents or libraries over to it's original location.

That is how we used to do it in the beginning and it is quite a time consuming process. And I know that from experience , we had an incident where two documents were deleted on a site that containg 12GB of data, so it took quite sometime to get the document back. Using a 3rd party product this process takes only a few minutes.

We are running the DocAve software here and I am very pleased with it. Their license cost however is pretty darn high. But do a search on the net and you should be able to find other products, that might do the trick but does not cost that much.

Regards,
Thomas

 

[scp1973]

I don't think we have too much data yet. SO, could I create another site on the same Sharepoint server, but use it just for backups and restores. Whenever a file needs to be restored I could overwrite the "backup" site, DL the file, then UL to the production site?

Would that plan work?

 

[Evilbart]

this works where size and SLA's permit
if you have some what i call "VIP-sites" and you don't want to invest (yet) in third party products i suggest taking backups with the smigrate utility to separate files (these are the same as frontpage backups)

you will loose security information but for the purpose of restoring some documents this is a good solution

kind regards


//Bart

http://sharepointblogs.com/bart

 

[scp1973]

Evilbart,

Would you mind expanding on this a bit more?

Using the smigrate utility to back up shared documents in Sharepoint.

 

[Evilbart]

For more information about the SharePoint Migration Tool (Smigrate.exe), see the "Backup and migration" section of the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Administrator's Guide. To obtain the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Administrator's Guide, visit the following Microsoft Web site:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...224-4b19-a6a4-3e33fa13d230&displaylang=en

happy reading

//Bart

http://sharepointblogs.com/bart

 

[scp1973]

Here is the solution I came up with. It is about 99% of what we want and it was FREE:

Turn on revisions. That protects us in case someone makes a doc change that we want to reverse.

Then download and install this: RecycleBin 1.1 for Sharepoint

http://www.gotdotnet.com/Workspaces/Workspace.aspx?id=8437a203-f377-401c-b23d-ae59e6f05b80

That protects us if someone deletes the file.

The only problem is that once deleted, we only retain the last revision.

Still a pretty decent solution for free.

Enjoy!

 

[TomLinAP]

As Thomas mentioned, DocAve will take care of item/document-level back ups and restores while preserving all the meta-data, version histories, and securities.

AvePoint also offers another product named TrashBin that will preserve all meta-data and version histories as well, if you are looking to preserve more than just latest version with Recyclebin1.1. As thomas had also mentioned, AvePoint products tend to be on the higher end of the cost spectrum due to our licensing scheme.

The good news is that both these products are avaiable for FREE download to evaluate on ourwebsite, so you can see for yourself if it is the right solution for your environment.

Tom Lin
AvePoint, Inc.
WHAT’S YOUR BACKUP PLAN?