When Disaster Strikes – Loss of a SharePoint Farm
February 10, 2012
Most SharePoint developers and administrators have nightmares about losing their content. Any number of things can go wrong when one deals with fragile electronic data storage and retrieval. Quite frankly, it is a miracle that data disasters do not strike more often. Our blog author, Paul, describes his terrifying account in “Five Things I Learned From Losing My SharePoint Farm.”
He recounts his thoughts and actions immediately after the loss:
I went home and made the first sensible decision of the evening. I went to bed. Partly I thought I should stay up and work on the problem but I was shattered and I wasn’t going to solve anything in the state I was in. When I woke up – at 5:00AM, screaming – I got to work and thankfully by midday I had the farm back in a working state and all the data accessible. During those painful hours I learned 5 valuable lessons that I thought were worth sharing for relative newcomers – like me – to SharePoint.
Paul goes on to suggest some practical solutions so that others do not suffer his same loss. Ideas include regular SQL backups and details documentation that is stored outside of the SharePoint installation itself, outside being the operative word there.
Many organizations are turning to smart third party solutions to help make the backup and restore process much simpler. Add automatic backup to the features of the Cloud and SharePoint administrator nightmares could be greatly reduce in frequency and severity.
One alternative that many organizations are turning to is Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Their comprehensive suite of solutions can stand alone or compliment an existing SharePoint infrastructure. Particular attention is given to their backup and restore options here.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 10, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Comments
4 Responses to “When Disaster Strikes – Loss of a SharePoint Farm”
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I am the blog author, Paul. I have never heard of this site before they took part of my article without asking. I in no way recommend Fabasoft Mindbreeze, which sounds like it could be a great sanitary product but a pretty rubbish SharePoint product.
Poor poor marketing. If your product is so bad that you have to steal other authors posts to sell it, you need to get out of the game cause clearly you dont know what you are doing, or are so cheap that no one would want to deal with you
Hey Emily Rae,
Whilst I have no problem with you referencing the posts, in fact I am quite happy for you to do so, however Paul being “Your author” is incorrect and it should be clear to see that neither Paul or SP365 endorse the third party products you reference.
Given that it is one of the most popular posts on the blog I would question the piggy backing of the post to increase your own rankings.
Thanks
Matthew Hughes (SP365)
Matt Hughes,
This is Stephen E Arnold. The Beyond Search service conforms to a standard practice of citing a source and then offering a comment. The purpose is to make it easy for me to locate information on a topic. When I need to write a profile of Autonomy, I use Beyond Search to generate a list of articles. Beyond Search, therefore, behaves like an abstracting service or the note cards I used to prepare when I was a high school and college debater. The content of the blog conforms to the guidelines set forth on the About page. If you want a story to go “beyond” what I do without charge for a small number of readers, feel free to post comments, corrections, or additional links in the Comments section of the blog. I am not a news service. I don’t care about PageRank or traffic. I am doing what I have been doing since I was 14 years old; that is, capturing information, quotes, observations, and sponsors. At age 67, rankings mean zero to me. What’s interesting is that you are interpreting my free service as something it is not, never will be, and has zero value to me and the author who is a professional information specialist working in a highly regarded academic library. The SEO mindset and the desperation to “be famous” or make sales has redefined some folks’ reality about “information”.
Stephen E Arnold, February 11, 2012