AvePoint - SharePoint Backup and Administration Software
Why Should You Backup SharePoint Data?
Groupware and document collaboration systems are now used by many organizations, and Microsoft® SharePoint® provides team members with a focal point for access to documents and spreadsheets, intelligence and project management systems, and integrated applications. For most organizations,
e-mail and SharePoint are essential for team productivity and collaboration.
Whether an organization uses or considers SharePoint, digital assets must be evaluated before implementing a backup or disaster recovery program. Frequency of access to shared and stored documents, regulatory compliance mandates, and restoration expenditures for lost data must be examined. The value of lost data is determined by restoration costs and associated downtime.
Why backup SharePoint data? Many events can cause data loss in SharePoint, to include:
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Hardware Failure |
| The Carnegie Mellon study suggests that hardware age is a factor in reliability, and it becomes significant within two years from initial deployment. Google examined age, heat, access, and diagnostic data and found that many drives fail suddenly and unexpectedly, without any prior warnings. RAID, motherboard malfunction, and general CPU failure all contribute to data loss. | |
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Data Center Destruction |
| An environmental disaster, such as a hurricane, flood, earthquake, fire (including smoke), or air conditioning failure can damage sensitive electronic equipment. A power surge or blown circuit can corrupt a disk cache, and terrorism or sabotage can destroy all equipment with data stored on it. | |
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Viruses, Worms, and Malicious Code |
| Many network administrators contend that anti-virus technology in collaboration environment is redundant because desktop anti-virus products identify exploits and vulnerabilities. However, many personal and home office computers do not have a desktop anti-virus program or have disabled it. Desktop anti-virus programs cannot scan some SharePoint documents simply because users can review and alter documents without storing the information on their desktop, therefore bypassing anti-virus software. If infected, these documents can propagate viruses and worms, re-format hard drives, or cause data destruction throughout the organization. | |
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Human Actions |
| Employees can accidentally delete the wrong file or directory within SharePoint that can affect coworker and team collaboration efforts. More importantly, employees can deliberately erase files in order to destroy important or incriminating records critical in legal or corporate auditing procedures. |
Recovering from a disaster such as a total disk crash can be very traumatic – more than most organizations realize. Small businesses can incur thousands of dollars in recovery costs, and for large organizations, the loss is much greater. Hardware failure and destruction, along with the file corruptions, are all common grounds for data failure and the leading causes of downtime.
The best defense against a major crisis or business failure due to data loss is a comprehensive backup system. Recovery planning is essential to prevent downtime, legal expenses, or financial losses caused by a disaster or hardware failure. DocAve Backup and Recovery allows a company to implement a high-quality, easy to deploy and operate, full-fidelity backup and restoration solution.
For those organizations where downtime relates to major productivity and financial losses or even legal complications, disaster recovery planning is a must. The primary cost is associated with the delay in recreating the SharePoint environment and restoring lost data. DocAve High Availability provides an instant, one-switch solution to standby SharePoint environments.
