Divide SharePoint Server in to three Data Recovery levels

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This article has description about several methods to perform recovery process When you recover data from corrupt SharePoint Server, first divides recovery of SharePoint Server in three primary levels: document recovery, site recovery, and full farm recovery.


Document Recovery

Most of the time only document, content or other items like task, discussion thread, folder, list, or document library get corrupted & you are not able to access these documents. Or inadvertent document deletion by a user is also common.

Tools and Techniques: 

• Deleted documents & items can be restored by recycle Bin without any secondary tools.
• In this scenario, SharePoint Central Administration used to back & restore individual components.

Site Recovery


The loss of a site & site collections is caused by data corruption, but inadvertent deletion by a user is also common. In this case data hosted in a site collection becomes unavailable from the content database due to some causes such as the accidental deletion of files, data corruption, or administrative error.


Tools and Techniques: 

• If an administrator has performed backups on a regular basis, site recovery is possible, but it is not a trivial task.
• Command line utility STSAdm.exe has more than 180 operations to backup & recovery operations. The utility can be back up & restore site collections, sub-sites, pages within the sites.

Full Farm Recovery


SharePoint Farm contains all information, if it get corrupted, all information get inaccessible like content database, web application. Farm loss is the most costly to any organization.


Tools and Techniques:

• In this case it is recommended to install new farm, create a new database, restore all web applications from updated backup and the re-deploy any customization.
• SharePoint Central Administration can back individual components but also entire SharePoint farm.
• In this case Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 can restore the configuration database, content databases, and customizations to a new SQL server.

Conclusion: SharePoint Server provides several inbuilt utilities to backup and recovery but they are usually limited features to recover single documents, lists, and sites, farm & take too long time. To complete following recovery process, all utilities required updated & accessible backups & day-to-day SharePoint management. Some companies offer SharePoint Recovery Software which have most advanced features to perform recovery process. The software has option to recover single document as well as full farm.