Back-up SharePoint with DPM2010

Woundering how to back-up SharePoint with DPM 2010 properly ? Below steps enables you easily to back-up your SharePoint environment.

To start and register the WSS Writer service:

1. Open a command prompt window using elevated privileges. From within the Command Windows, navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM\bin and launch ‘ConfigureSharepoint.exe’
2. In the command window that appears, you will see the request “Enter the user name for “WSSCmdletsWrapper:” Enter the account name for the user account you granted Farm Administrator credentials
   If you enter an invalid account, you will receive the following:
   ◦Invalid user name.
   ◦Examples of valid user name are “username@domain” and “domain\username”.
   ◦Once you add a Fully Qualified account name and hit enter, you are presented with the next line requesting a password.
3. Enter the password for ‘WSSCmdletsWrapper’:
   After a moment of configuring, the entry “The command completed successfully” will appear and the CMD window will close.

DPM only offers the option of protecting the entire SharePoint farm as seen in the screenshot below. This changes when the discussion revolves around recovery of data, as we will see in the next section. DPM provide a great deal of granularity when it comes to recovery of SharePoint data.

If the WSSCmdletsWrapper is not registered properly, then the SharePoint farm you see in the screen shot above will not appear. If it is missing, run the ConfigureSharePoint.exe utility on a SharePoint front-end web server to allow DPM to reconfigure the necessary options.

At this stage, you should be able to create a DPM Protection Group which contains the SharePoint servers take an initial replication of the content. Depending on the size of the sites, this can take a few minutes to hours to complete.

All relevant SharePoint databases are selected by automatically. There is no need to select those one-by-one or by Database Protection group(s).

Since there are numerous distributed SharePoint implementations across many servers, we need to talk about which of these servers to protect. Here is a short list.

• Web Front-end servers – Since all are the same, only one will need to have the ConfigureSharePoint.exe on it to register the WSS Writer.
• Configuration Database Server – The data stored here is unique and not stored on other database servers so it is vital that you have a DPM Agent installed to protect it.
• Content Database Servers – Content databases host all the information, content, and data of the farm. Each needs to be protected by a DPM Agent.

Creation of a DPMRecoveryWebApplication isn’t required any more with SharePoint 2010.

Thanks to Jeff Hugh