A couple of months ago, a friend found a bit of information on TechNet that has proven to be quite useful.

See, I am of the opinion SharePoint allows for smaller deployments to be made, and with that said, I am talking about SharePoint Foundation 2010 being used for the most part.

But truly the point here is not to discuss whether or not a deployment of SharePoint Foundation 2010 or SharePoint Server 2010 is right or not.  The fact is they do take place and happen.  And information will reside there.

Now, the point of this post is to raise awareness on options available for companies that have implemented it and maybe are a bit “iffy” on how to protect the information being placed in libraries and lists.  In many cases I have found SharePoint comes first and business continuity becomes an afterthought. 

The documentation piece from TechNet states:

“You can register SharePoint Server 2010 with Windows Server Backup by using the stsadm.exe -o -registerwsswriter operation to configure the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) writer for SharePoint Server. Windows Server Backup then includes SharePoint Server 2010 in server-wide backups. When you restore from a Windows Server backup, you can select Microsoft SharePoint Foundation (no matter which version of SharePoint 2010 Products is installed), and all components reported by the VSS writer forSharePoint Server 2010 on that server at the time of the backup will be restored.

Windows Server Backup is recommended only for use with for single-server deployments.”

Even in the event of single-server deployments you will have options to safeguard your data.

The process will require that after you have executed the stsadm command above, you will then use Windows Server Backup to do a Full Server Backup.  Then when the restore operation is needed you will be able to select specifically the section that has the SharePoint technologies backup.

The restore process:

Hope you find this to be a helpful post.  I have found this to be specially handy in SharePoint deployments that are part of a Team Foundation Server deployment and that are isolated from any other SharePoint farm and such.

 

Credits:  Sean McDonough for passing along the information available on TechNet.