TWO Advanced backup/recovery features of SharePoint 2010

Microsoft added 2 advanced features in SharePoint 2010 which was not available in SharePoint server 2007. The features are:

Granular Backup/Restore 

In SharePoint 2010 we can easily maintain full backups as well as granular backups. With granular backups, recovery of single document is also possible. In SharePoint Server 2007, backup and restore process was only as granular as the site collection. Before SharePoint 2010 launch, third party utilities used to recover an individual site, list, library, document, or item. In SharePoint 2010, granular backup is available through Central Administrator or PowerShell. Now It’s possible to backup & restore SharePoint site collection, sites, lists, document libraries, and items. For this process, first you mount the backup, export the desired object, then import it into the production database. 

You can use this feature from here:

Go to central administration-->Backup and Restore-->Granular Backup

Recover data from unattached content database  

Now You don't need to attach content database backup to the SQL Server to recover data from there. SharePoint 2010 has a feature to recover data from unattached content database. To use the unattached content database recovery, you will need to remember some points:: 

• To know document original location. 
• when the document was corrupted or deleted. Through these information you can grab the backup file from the right date. 
• You need to mount the database on a SQL server. For this you can use same SQL instance used by SharePoint or a different. Make sure, If you restore into the same SQL instance, use different name for the restored database.

You can use this feature from here: 

Go to SharePoint Central Administration>> Backup and Restore>>click the “Recover data from an unattached content database” link under Granular Backup.

Conclusion: With these two features of SharePoint 2010, you can easily perform backup & recovery process on single document & unattached content database. This is evergreen hot topic for any database as well for SharePoint Server- Backup & Recovery Process. So this is more important to update yourself with each & every updation related to database backup & recovery.