Beginning SharePoint® 2007 Administration: Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0 and Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007

14.4. Backing Up a Complete Farm

This version of STSADM 2007 can back up a complete farm, including index files. This is sometimes referred to as a "catastrophic backup and restore" procedure. This type of process is a backup of all the SharePoint databases on the SQL Server, plus all the files that are related to the indexing system. However, this backup process will not cover IIS configuration settings, modified site definition files, or other direct modifications of the files related to SharePoint are stored in the file system. Be sure to run a complete backup of these other files and IIS configurations (such as the Metabase) as well.

When running a complete farm backup, you can select either a full backup or an incremental backup (i.e., only changes). This type of backup is a replacement for the backup process described later in this chapter in the section Backup with the Central Administration Tool. In fact, each time you run this backup process, it will be listed in the Central Administration tool under the Backup and restore history page. Following is a step-by-step instruction on how to perform a full backup of a SharePoint farm and save these backup files to the c:\bkup folder, plus how to check the status of this process in the SharePoint Central Administration tool.

Try It Out: Back Up a Complete Farm with STSADM Log on to the SharePoint server as the administrator. Open a command window and run the following command: Stsadm –o backup directory c:\bkup –backupmethod ...