On Tuesday, we discussed the restrictions that come with a large SharePoint content database. Not only does a large content database slow down the functionality of your environment, but it’s also a major pain to backup and restore.
With many companies managing more than 1TB of content through SharePoint, and that number growing at 65 percent every year, it’s imperative to backup SharePoint so none of that content is lost. The issue is that SharePoint’s native STSADM backup and SharePoint Central Admin backup just can’t hack it with that much data.
Read “Changing the SharePoint Backup Game” to learn more.
SharePoint’s recovery methods also fall short of the mark when dealing with recovery time. Recycling bins have a default of 30 days, and after that end-users need to turn to administrators in order to be able to regain access to deleted or lost content. A hassle in and of itself that’s only made worse when extending the recycling bins withhold cycle, since content in the bin isn’t really deleted. This only further adds to the size of your content database, circling back and creating difficulties with your backup options. It’s a vicious circle that leaves you vulnerable.
Companies often turn to third-party solutions when dealing with backup and recovery. The issue with this often tends to be finding a solution that will help you with both backup and recovery simultaneously. Furthermore, you need a solution that will assist in decreasing your current SharePoint database size. Finding different solutions to meet all of these criteria becomes costly. This means that your content database is still huge and still a pain to backup and will continue to pose a risk.
Enter Metalogix StoragePoint and its array of SharePoint backup and recovery options. It meets all of your needs in one product, and unloads unneeded Binary Large Objects (BLOBs) in the process. StoragePoint is designed to reduce SharePoint storage costs while improving performance. Furthermore, it doesn’t just help you backup and restore your environment, but also works to fix the original problem.
StoragePoint actually works to enhance SharePoint’s native out-of-the-box content backup and recovery processes. How does it do this? By allowing for the following three actions:
- Removal of BLOBs from SQL Server.
- Granular restoration of content from SQL backups.
- Content Compression before externalization.
StoragePoint works by offloading BLOBs – the documents and other types of unstructured data that are the actual content in SharePoint – from your environment. They make up 95% of the overall database and by offloading them; you significantly decrease the size of your database. In turn, SharePoint’s out-of-the-box solutions are able to handle backup and restore of your databases without a problem. Better yet, if you’ve already sprung the funds for a third-party backup tool, StoragePoint is a compatible with most of them, so it’ll only further enhance capabilities.
Now that you’ve removed the BLOBs from your database, you need a tool to backup these now external files. Native SharePoint tools will not do this for you, but StoragePoint will.
It closes the gap with a BLOB backup capability that automatically and continuously creates copies of BLOBs after they are written to their primary BLOB store(s). This constant and automatic backing up of your BLOBs provides for a very low recovery point objective (RPO).
Recovery is obviously of great importance for any SharePoint environment. StoragePoint is the complete package as it provides granular restore capabilities. Unlike native tools, recovery with StoragePoint does not require the creation of a recovery farm.
Metalogix Selective Restore Manager essentially picks up right where the recycling bin stops. It has the ability to restore anything from single items to entire site collections from SQL Server backup files or from BLOBs backed up by StoragePoint.
Content compression is another one of the major benefits provided by the StoragePoint software. By allowing for content compression before externalization to a BLOB store, StoragePoint aids in a faster backup with a faster recovery time as well. Using compression in conjunction with other technologies and services can also reduce your overall storage costs, so you’ll be saving money as well.
To learn all the benefits, read the whitepaper: “Changing the SharePoint Backup Game: How to Backup Multi-Terabyte SharePoint Farms in Minutes.”