SharePoint 2010: Business Continuity Plan

Business continuity is the activity performed by an organization to ensure that critical business functions will be available to customers, suppliers, regulators, and other entities that must have access to those functions. These activities include many daily chores such as project management, system backups, change control, and help desk. Business continuity is not something implemented at the time of a disaster; Business Continuity refers to those activities performed daily to maintain service, consistency, and recoverability.
The foundation of business continuity are the standards, program development, and supporting policies; guidelines, and procedures needed to ensure a firm to continue without stoppage, irrespective of the adverse circumstances or events. All system design, implementation, support, and maintenance must be based on this foundation in order to have any hope of achieving business continuity, disaster recovery, or in some cases, system support. Business continuity is sometimes confused with disaster recovery, but they are separate entities. Disaster recovery is a small subset of business continuity. It is also sometimes confused with Work Area Recovery (due to loss of the physical building which the business is conducted within); which is but a part of business continuity.
The term Business Continuity describes a mentality or methodology of conducting day-to-day business, whereas business continuity planning is an activity of determining what that methodology should be. The business continuity plan may be thought of as the incarnation of a methodology that is followed by everyone in an organization on a daily basis to ensure normal operations.
Some interesting commands-, 

 
(For more STSADM command mapping to PowerShell see: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff621081.aspx)

We will use the out of box backup operation in Central Administration to back up the intranet Web application.

• Log on to Front-end as DOMAIN\Administrator
• Create a new folder, C:\SharePointBackup. Assign NTFS permissions that allow the Users group FullControl. Share the folder with the share name, SharePointBackup, and with share permissions that allow the Everyone group Full Control.
• Open SharePoint 2010 Central Administration, click the Backup and Restore
• Perform a full backup of the Web application, to the backup share \SERVER\SharePointBackup.
• Wait until Phase shows as Completed.

You can now see, you’re backup of your farm is available on the shared drive.

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Now we will use Windows PowerShell and the Windows Task Scheduler to automate the nightly backup of your SharePoint farm.

• Create a new folder, C:\Scripts.
• Create a script named C:\Scripts\Backup.ps1, with the following text:

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell
Backup-SPFarm -directory \\SERVER\SharePointBackup -backupmethod Full

• Create a scheduled task using the following specifications:
  • Task name: Backup SharePoint – FULL
  • Description: Back up the SharePoint farm
  • Schedule: Daily at 1:00 a.m.
  • Action: Start the program PowerShell.exe with the argument C:\Scripts\backup.ps1.
  • Run the script as DOMAIN\Administrator and choose the option to Run whether user is logged on or not.
  • Run with highest privileges.
  • Provide the password.

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Monitor the backup operation

• Switch to SharePoint 2010 Central Administration, and then browse to the Backup and Restore Job Status page.
• Refresh the page and examine the information that is presented on the page.
• Browse to the Backup and Restore History, and then examine the information that is presented.
• Return to the Backup and Restore Job Status page, and then wait for the Phase to be Completed before continuing to the next lab.
• Close all open applications and windows.

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Partial Restore

• Open SQL Server Management Studio as DOMAIN\Administrator with the password.
• Right-click Databases, and then click Restore Database.
• In the To Database box, type WSS_CONTENT.
• Click From device, and then select C:\SharePointBackup\spbr0000\000000xx.bak, where 000000xx.bak is the backup of the WSS_Technet
• In the Select the backup sets to restore box, select the check box next to WSS_Technet

Delete a list

• Delete the Announcements list.

Export a list from an unattached content database

• Switch to SharePoint 2010 Central Administration, and then browse to the Unattached Content Database Recovery page.
• Perform an export with the following specifications:
• Database name: WSS_CONTENT
• Object: /Announcements
• Export to filename: \SERVER\SharePointBackup\ITAnnouncements.cmp
• Export full security

Restore a deleted list
Switch to SharePoint 2010 Management Shell.

Import-SPWeb -identity http://SERVER/Sites/IT -path c:\SharePointBackup\ITAnnouncements.cmp