SharePoint Backup and Recovery

Galaxy Backup & Recovery
Installing Galaxy Backup & Recovery is straightforward, with options to install agents locally or on remote servers. The Quick Start Guide provides a checklist of information you'll need at various steps of the installation and shows snapshots of the screens you'll encounter.

The installation process involves the CommServe software, which manages the media agents and the file system agent. The media agents you need depend on the backup destination type, which determines the configuration and management of the backup media. The SharePoint agent requires the file system agent.

Galaxy includes an optional firewall configuration wizard, which I found to be useful for configuring ports through a firewall for the various remote agents and the CommServe console communications. In Internet and extranet scenarios, you commonly deploy SharePoint components in a screened subnet.

Media agents are available to support a variety of backup destinations, including SAN and NAS, and Galaxy supports Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP). I found it interesting that if your source and destination media are within the same SAN, data transport can occur solely within the SAN rather than using the network. However, I didn't have the equipment or expertise to test this capability.

Galaxy comes with an embedded SQL Server 2000 instance license and requires a named instance called COMMVAULTQINETIX for its database. If you're installing through Terminal Services or on Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition, you'll need to install the instance before installing the CommServe component.

If Microsoft IIS is installed, you can administer the CommServe console through an optional Web site, which you can create during installation. SQL Server Books Online (BOL) is also available through this Web site.

The console control panel provides tools and wizards for most configuration tasks. Figure 2 shows the Galaxy Backup & Restore management console. I had some difficulty configuring a local hard drive destination until I learned that Galaxy calls disk locations magnetic libraries.

After I completed the configuration and backed up my portal and standalone sites, I started exploring the recovery options, and the fun began. The Browse & Recover tool let me view the latest data and pick any point in time from my backups. I could drill down through my site structure to recover objects at any level, including individual documents. The SharePoint agent backups let you search for documents by name, version, author, title, and size.

You can restore at the original location or to another location or client. When restoring a collection of items (say, a document library), you can choose to either overwrite or skip existing items. So, if a user had deleted some but not all items in a document library, you could restore the entire library but replace only lost items. This is an excellent feature not available in other products.

With version-enabled document libraries, you can recover any version that's been backed up. Like Backup Exec, Galaxy Backup & Recovery supports synthetic backups. Since an individual document version can be restored with Galaxy, it's important to note that the synthetic backup retains only the last approved document in version-enabled document libraries, while Galaxy's standard backups retain all versions. Galaxy also supports SQL Server transaction-log backups. Managing the transaction logs permits pointin-time restorations, database restoration with transaction log replays, and log shipping to other SQL Server systems.

Galaxy Backup & Recovery offers so many backup options that you'll probably need training to take full advantage of them all. The multitude of options also increases the possibility of configuration errors and omissions. But that power provides both disaster recovery and granular recovery and earns this product my highest rating and the Editors' Choice award.