SPS13 - How to fully backup a SharePoint Farm
In general , you need to backup the whole farm through the SharePoint UI and/or the SQL databases.
It depends on each customer to create a working backup plan and test it in a regular interval.
More information you may find at the following links:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee662536(v=office.15).aspx
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg266384(v=office.15).aspx
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee428315(v=office.15).aspx
Plan for backup and recovery in SharePoint 2013 https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261687(v=office.15).aspx
I would also suggest you to backup the following (regarding customizations, settings, folders, etc) – as a general plan:
The various components included in a SharePoint system:
- Content
- Customizations
- Configurations (Office SharePoint server)
- Binary Files
- Configurations (IIS)
- Binary Files (OS)
For backing up and restoring both operating system and sharePoint program files, we recommend that you use Windows server Backup (NTBackup) on a regular basis. Additionally, we recommend that you keep copies of the installation disks for your operating system, SharePoint and software updates both onsite and offshore. This will help you roll back software updates and validate that you have correctly reconfigured your system.
To Backup your IIS configurations:
IIS configurations are set in Central Administration or IIS Manager on each WFE. In addition, these configurations are also set on any computers in your system that runs SQL server Reporting Services (SSRS).
IIS configurations are stored in the IIS metabase and include the following:
- Application pool settings, including service accounts
- IIS compression settings
- Time out settings
- Custom ISAPI filers
- Computer domain membership
- Network Load Balancing settings
- Host Header entries
- SSL Certificates
- Dedicated IP Address settings
We recommend that for each WFE server, you should document ALL configurations.
In SharePoint, the IIS configurations are set in CA and stored in the Configuration Database. Although you can backup both configuration database and CA, they contain computer-specific information and can only be restored to an environment that is configured to be precisely the same, including software updates, server names and number of servers. In order to back up the configuration database you must take the farm completely offline or use DataProtectionManager (if installed on your environment).
We recommend that you document all settings in CA and by all settings, we mean :
- Application pool settings, including service accounts
- DB names and locations
- Web Application names and databases (ensure that you have documented the content database names associated with each Web App).
- Crawler impact rules
- Farm-level search settings
- External service connection settings
- Workflow management settings
- Activated features
- Alternate Access Mappings settings
Customizations for SharePoint sites may include:
- Master pages, page layouts and CSS (stored in the content database for a Web Application)
- Web parts, site or list definitions, custom columns, new content types, custom fields, custom actions, coded workflows or workflow activities and conditions
- Third-party solutions and their associated binary files and registry keys, such as IFilters
- Changes to standard XML files
- Custom site definitions (webtemp.xml)
On WFEs, customization files are stored in Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12. Some customizations also write changes to the Web.config file.
We recommend that you backup these directories with Windows Server Backup:
- Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\15
- Inetpub (the IIS Virtual directories)
- C:\Winnt\assembly (Global Assembly Cache for .NET Framework code assemblies)
You could also, package all customizations as solutions (as the container) in order to deploy.