Protecting and recovering data when working with software updates (Windows SharePoint Services)

  • Article

Applies To: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

 

Topic Last Modified: 2009-04-15

In this article:

  • Back up search

  • Back up databases

  • After backing up, and before you apply a software update

  • Using database backups after a software update

Before applying software updates, after you have taken your servers offline, you should back up search, and all databases related to your environment.

For more information about deploying software updates, see Deploy software updates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

Use the full backup operation from SharePoint Central Administration or the Stsadm command-line tool to back up search. The backup operation includes both the search database and search index file.

Note

Before you back up, verify that that the drive that you are backing up to has enough free space to back up the entire farm. Even though you are only backing up search, if you do not have free space for the entire farm, the backup operation will fail. For more information, see Back up a farm by using built-in tools (Windows SharePoint Services 3.0).

Back up databases

The following sections describe recommendations for how to back up each type of database for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

Configuration database and Central Administration content database

Perform a full backup operation on the configuration database and the Central Administration content database by using either the Stsadm command-line tool or SQL Server tools. If you are using SQL Server tools, use the simple recovery model so that your transaction log is truncated.

Content databases

Perform a full backup operation by using either the Stsadm command-line tool or SQL Server tools to back up all content databases. If you are using SQL Server tools, use the simple recovery model so that your transaction log is truncated.

After backing up, and before you apply a software update

After backing up, verify that you can restore the databases.

After you have backed up all of your databases, use SQL Server Management Studio or the SQL Server DBCC shrinkfile command to free unused log space, making the logs as empty and large as possible. For more information, see Shrinking the Transaction Log (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=105233&clcid=0x409).

Using database backups after a software update

After you apply a software update, verify that the update applied successfully across the farm. For details, see the "Verify installation" section of the topic Deploy software updates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

A recommended practice is to restore a farm to the same version that you backed up from. You can restore a content database to a later version.

Download this book

This topic is included in the following downloadable book for easier reading and printing:

See the full list of available books at Downloadable books for Windows SharePoint Services.

See Also

Concepts

Protecting and restoring the farm (Windows SharePoint Services 3.0)