Disaster Recovery for SharePoint

SharePoint is one of those technologies that has the potential to be an incredible enterprise asset or a huge pain point depending on how it’s utilized. It can help teams collaborate and surface critical business information or connect systems in unique ways. In either case, a failure of the platform can be costly and impact business operations. Whether you’re using the platform for basic team collaboration or advanced business intelligence it’s important to plan for disaster recovery of this mission critical system.

There are multiple approaches to implementing a Disaster Recovery (DR) solution for SharePoint. The approach you choose will depend on your requirements for allowed data loss and the time you have to recover from a failure.

Some DR options include dual crawls, where the recovery farm also crawls the production farm to ensure the same content is discovered and indexed. While this solution provides full fidelity, it can be complex to implement and requires the application of configuration changes such as managed properties, crawled file types, installed IFilters, etc.

Another DR option is to log ship or replicate the SSA administration database between farms. This enables you to recover the service applications, and associated content databases, in a warm standby environment. This approach can be more cost effective, but does not offer the same level of configuration change protection as a dual-crawl solution.

For a successful DR solution it is important that the server topology and platform architecture at the DR site match the matched servers at the production site. The DR site must also have the same related software that was installed on the production site at the time of backup, such as SQL Server, SnapManager for SharePoint, and Microsoft.NET Framework.