5 1 0:SharePoint Restore

Overview

SEP sesam uses the SharePoint Recovery Pro plugin (Ontrack PowerControls for SharePoint), a powerful recovery solution for Microsoft SharePoint Server that allows you to browse or search through backed up items (documents, blog entries, etc.), and restore entire SharePoint sites or single items (documents, lists, folders, etc.) using drag-and-drop.

To successfully restore a SharePoint backup, all preparation steps must be performed properly. For details, see SharePoint Backup.

Restore options

The following options are available when using the SharePoint Recovery Pro plugin:

• Viewing, copying or exporting a file, its metadata and attachments
• Viewing, copying or exporting all previous versions of a source list item one at a time
• Duplicate checking when copying and pasting SharePoint data, which prompts for an overwrite confirmation if duplicates are found
• Searching the backed up SharePoint database files by keyword, item type, user or date
• Each item in the Find results can be opened, copied & pasted, exported or saved
• Searching within files or attachments
• Exporting data from a source to a local or network drive destination
• Restoring the content (items, lists, folders, and sites) to a live SharePoint Server

Prerequisites

• SharePoint Recovery Pro is only available on Windows and must be installed on the SEP sesam Server or RDS. For details, see SharePoint Backup.
• Make sure that there is sufficient free space on the Windows x64 system that will be used to recover the SharePoint database and all associated transaction log files as a file.
• The Ontrack PowerControls Agent for Content Transfer Service must be running on the SharePoint Server in order to restore content to a specific site; see Installing Ontrack PowerControls Agent.
• If the backups are encrypted, compressed or stored on tape or a Linux data store, a manual restore to a Windows x64 system (with installed SEP sesam Client and SharePoint Recovery Pro) is required.

Restoring SharePoint

To perform a restore with SharePoint Recovery Pro you have to use both, the SEP sesam GUI restore wizard and the Ontrack PowerControls extension. This section only describes SharePoint-specific steps and options. For more details on how to configure a restore task in the SEP sesam GUI, see the Standard Restore Procedure.

	Note
	SEP sesam provides the web Restore Assistant interface which is designed to be more intuitive and offers additional advanced options compared to GUI restore wizard while, on the other hand, it does not support the restore of special tasks types, such as SharePoint, MS SQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc. For these task types you can only use the GUI restore wizard to restore your data.

1. From the SEP sesam GUI menu bar, select Activities -> Restore. The New Restore Task window opens.
2. Select the SharePoint saveset you want to restore. You can search savesets by task name or by filename or path.
   • When searching by task name, use the drop-down list of available tasks and select the one you want to restore from. This option is selected by default.
   • If you are searching by filename/path, select the option Filename or path in a saveset and enter your search expression in the search pattern field.
3. Under the Saved in period drop-down lists, specify the time frame for which you want to conduct the search. Click Next.
4. The search results are displayed. From the list of savesets matching your query, click the version you want to restore. Under the Single file restore, select the checkbox Mount saveset. The target saveset is mounted to the SEP sesam home directory var\tmp\mnt, e.g., C:\Program Files\SEPsesam\var\tmp\mnt\saveset_ID. Click Next.
   Note that you can mount any saveset stored to default data store Path or to Si3 data store. Mounting is not possible if the savesets are stored on tapes or if the data is compressed or encrypted.
5. Remain in this step in the SEP sesam restore wizard and open the Ontrack PowerControls extension. The Ontrack PowerControls data wizard is displayed.


6. Under the Source Path Selection, click Add and browse the saveset in the SEP sesam mnt directory to select your SharePoint data (*.mdf) and transaction log (*.ldf) files. In the Temporary File Path field, a default location for the .idx and .dat files already exists. Make sure that there is at least 1 GB of available disk space in the temporary directory (for example, C:\temp). If there is insufficient space in the temp directory, specify a new location. Click Next.
7. Under the Target Server Selection, enter the URL (root directory) of the Server running the SharePoint site that you are using as the target, or select an existing target from the drop-down list. Then select Connect as a different Windows user and enter your credentials. You have to use the SharePoint farm administrator user name. Click Next.


8. Under the Agent for Content Transfer Service, enter a valid port number in the Port Number box. This is the same port number that you used when installing Ontrack PowerControls for SharePoint; see Installing SEP sesam SharePoint Recovery Pro package. Then select Connect as a different Windows user and enter your credentials. You have to use the SharePoint farm administrator user name. Click Finish. The main window of Ontrack PowerControls is displayed.
9. The Source panes in the main window display the source .mdf (also .ndf, if exist) and .ldf files that you selected in the step 6 (Source Path Selection ). You can browse and open the source items or click the magnifying glass icon to open the Find dialog.
You can view any file's metadata from the source and target list, open the file directly from the metadata window with its native application, check the file versions, and open attachments if their native applications are installed. You can only open one file at a time. A temporary version is created for each opened file and removed when you close Ontrack PowerControls.

	Note
	When you close the Ontrack PowerControls, the files that remain open in their native application are not removed. Make sure that your temporary location is not full or you won't be able to open any file in the Ontrack PowerControls.




10. In the Source window, select what you want to restore (item, list or site level), then drag & drop the selected items to the target destination. You can also restore the whole site by dragging and dropping it to the target pane.
Consider the following when restoring the whole site:
• If a site no longer exists, a site with the same functions as original must be created before the restore job is started.
• If the source site is pasted into the root of a target, you will have to provide the primary site collection administrator information.
• You can only restore a site with the same functions. If there are any existing duplicated items on the target, they will be overwritten.

	Note
	If the site does not meet Microsoft standards, it will not work. For example, if some custom solutions were installed into SharePoint and deployed in SharePoint sites, the restore might not work. In this case, ask your SharePoint administrator for help to recreate the site to the default settings and run the restore again.

11. When done, close the Ontrack PowerControls. In the SEP sesam GUI, click Cancel to close your restore session and exit the SEP sesam restore wizard.

Monitoring restore

You can view the status of your restore jobs in the SEP sesam GUI by selecting Job State -> Restores from the Main Selection. Restore overview provides detailed information on the last run of restore jobs, including the task name, status (successful, error, in queue ...), start and stop time of the last backup, data size, throughput, client and message.

As of 4.4.3 Beefalo V2, you can also monitor the restore progress using the Web UI. For details, see SEP sesam Web UI.

See also

Standard Restore Procedure – SharePoint Backup

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