SharePoint 2010 Backup & Recovery Best Practices

It is important to backup your data to prevent data loss in case of disaster. Backup and recovery process consumes system resources and sometime slow down the performance of database. In order to prevent database from slowing down and to reduce usage of resources you just need to follow some simple tips. Here are the best practices for SharePoint 2010 backup and recovery.

1. Always backup your data on a local disk and then copy it to network folder.
2. Don't perform backup operation on the same disk on which MS SQL Server 2008 SP1 is running.
3. Perform backup when database is in offline mode.
4. Instead of having one large database, keep two or more smaller databases. It will speed up the backup and recovery process.
5. If you have very large and complex database then use incremental backup. Incremental backups are much faster than full backups.
6. You can also reduce the size of your large backup using backup compression technique.
7. To increase the performance of backup and restore you can change configuration settings in Windows PowerShell and Central Administration.
8. By default SP 2010 compress files while exporting site collections, document libraries or lists. File compression consume more resources and slow down the performance of Sharepoint. So you can set the NoFileCompression parameter in Windows PowerShell.
9. In SharePoint 2010, by default a log file is created whenever you export contents. You can use NoLogFile parameter to save resources.
10. If you are using both database level backup and farm level backup then choose the tool according to the size of site collection:

• If site collection size is less than 15 GB then use Backup -SPSite of Windows PowerShell.
• If site collection size is 15-100 GB then use either a SQL Server tool or any database backup tool.
• If site collection size is larger than 100 GB then use differential backup.

11. Make sure you have enough disk space to store the backup.
12. Test consistency of backups regularly.
13. To prevent data loss in case of natural calamities, store the duplicate copy of backup at some different location from server.