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Programming with the SharePoint Foundation Backup/Restore Object Model

Applies to: SharePoint Foundation 2010

This topic describes the architecture of the backup and restore object model in SharePoint Foundation and provides some advice about how to program against it. Your backup application can be an independent application or a custom Powershell cmdlet. For more information about how to create Powershell cmdlets for SharePoint, see Windows PowerShell in the SharePoint Management Shell.

Note

There is a variant backup and restore object model for custom Web services that implement the Service Application Framework. It is not discussed in this topic. For more information, see Backing Up and Restoring in the Service Application Framework.

The Backup and Restore Object Model

At the top of the object model is the SPBackupRestoreConsole class. (See callout 1 in Figure 1.) It provides an umbrella operations manager responsible for queuing backup and restore jobs, starting jobs, and persisting a history of jobs in the form of .xml files. An object of this class is "just underneath the surface" of the UI of a backup application. Its members are mainly static methods and properties that provide hooks for the UI of the backup application. Both the Central Administration application, PowerShell, and the stsadm.exe command-line tool use these hooks.

Only one object of this class exists in a farm, and it is created the first time one of its members is called. It remains in memory until the next time Internet Information Server (IIS) is reset; however, its memory footprint is small.

Figure 1. The primary objects in the backup/restore hierarchy.

The major classes in the backup object model.

Each particular backup or restore operation is represented by an object of the class SPBackupRestoreConsoleObject that is created by the CreateBackupRestore(SPBackupRestoreSettings) method of the console object. (See callout 2 in Figure 1, the queued backup and restore operations.) The properties of one of these lightweight objects hold information about the operation, such as whether it is a backup or a restore, the location of the backup files, the backup or restore method, the current stage of the operation, and the tree of content components that is being backed up or restored. Each of these objects also has an Id property of type Guid that serves as a handle for the object that can be passed to the methods of SPBackupRestoreConsole. For example, Run(Guid, SPBackupRestoreObject) is passed the ID of the operation (that is, the SPBackupRestoreConsoleObject object) that the console is to run next. Finally, each SPBackupRestoreConsoleObject has a Settings property that holds a persisting object that contains a reusable pattern of backup or restore settings. This object also identifies the content component that the operation is to back up or restore. The settings objects are discussed in more detail near the end of this section.

Although the SPBackupRestoreConsoleObject objects represent operations, the content components themselves are represented by SPBackupRestoreObject objects. (See callout 3 in Figure 1.) These objects can be nested with the Children property. Therefore, each one represents a tree of one or more content components. For example, a Web application could be represented by an SPBackupRestoreObject object that has each of the Web application's content databases as child SPBackupRestoreObject objects. The tree of components that are the subject of a particular backup or restore operation are internally linked to the SPBackupRestoreConsoleObject object that represents the operation. You can get a reference to the topmost SPBackupRestoreObject object in the tree by passing the ID of the SPBackupRestoreConsoleObject object to the GetRoot(Guid) method.

An SPBackupRestoreObject object is a container for two critical types of objects:

Besides acting as a container, SPBackupRestoreObject is a helper class that provides easier interaction between the operation objects (SPBackupRestoreConsoleObject), on the one hand, and the component information objects (SPBackupRestoreInformation, IBackupRestore and IBackupRestoreConfiguration), on the other.

The final major classes are SPBackupSettings and SPRestoreSettings. An object of one of these two types is passed to the CreateBackupRestore(SPBackupRestoreSettings) method when an operation is created. (See callout 5 in Figure 1.) Each of these objects holds settings for use in operations; most importantly, they identify, in their IndividualItem property, the content component (or configuration settings component) that is the subject of the backup or restore operation. (See callout 6 in Figure 1.)

Programming Advice

The following information may be helpful to the development of backup and restore solutions.

Ways of Customization

Most of the critical classes in the backup/restore object model are sealed (NotInheritable in Microsoft Visual Basic). Moreover, although the following classes are not sealed, deriving from them is not supported. In each case, you must use the existing derived classes:

Accordingly, there are just two primary points of customization:

Tip

Although these are the two primary ways of developing against the main SharePoint Foundation object model, you can also work programmatically with database snapshots and restorations from unattached databases. For more information on these topics, see Programmatic Administration of Database Snapshots, Fine-grained Data Restoration from Unattached Database, and How to: Create a Database Class That Can Be Restored From a Snapshot.

Permissions

Code that backs up content must run in the user context of a farm administrator. Code that restores must run in the context of a user who is both a farm administrator and an administrator on all the front-end servers. The user should also have read and write permissions for the backup location.

Failure Logging

If a backup or restore operation fails, details about the failure are logged in spbackup.log or sprestore.log in the backup location.

Backups and Restores of Site Collections

Except for custom content types that you create by implementing IBackupRestore, the smallest content object that you can back up and restore with the classes in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.Backup namespace is a content database. To programmatically backup or restore individual site collections, use SPSiteCollection.Backup and SPSiteCollection.Restore. For more information on backing up and restoring site collections, see How to: Programmatically Back Up and Restore a Single Site Collection.

See Also

Tasks

How to: Programmatically Back Up Content

How to: Programmatically Restore Content

How to: Programmatically Back Up and Restore a Single Site Collection

How to: Create a Content Class That Can Be Backed Up and Restored

How to: Create a Database Class That Can Be Restored From a Snapshot

Code Sample: Creating a Content Class That Can Be Backed Up

Reference

Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.Backup

Backup

Restore

Other Resources

Stsadm.exe command-line tool