SharePoint 2010 Central Administration : Restoring Within Central Administration

The flipside of backup is restore, and carrying out restore operations is one of those things that tends to peg the average administrator’s stress meter. In many cases, restore operations are being carried out under duress and on a tight timeline; given these facts, it makes sense that you should practice them when you have the opportunity. As you repeatedly execute restore operations, you get better, more efficient, and ultimately more comfortable with them.

Many administrators prefer Central Administration for restore operations simply because it tends to offer a better end user experience compared to command line operations. Selection of restore targets tends to be much easier, quicker, and less error prone when done through a GUI. Central Administration also provides quite a bit of feedback at each step of a restore; this feedback can reassure and help in troubleshooting measures if something does go awry.

Restoring a Full Farm

Full farm restoration is usually associated with the disaster scenario you never want to find yourself in. If you have to restore a complete SharePoint farm from a catastrophic backup, something has gone very, very wrong.

What a Full Farm Restore Really Is

First, you need to be aware of one important fact: SharePoint’s full farm restore capabilities do not support bare-metal recovery scenarios. In addition, there is one prerequisite you must address before you can consider a full farm recovery; specifically, the servers that are the target of the farm recovery operation need to already be set up as a functional SharePoint farm. The farm also needs to be running a version of SharePoint that matches the version of the full farm catastrophic backup that you are going to restore.

Did you catch that part about needing a functional SharePoint farm? This may seem highly contradictory; after all, why would you need to create a farm to restore a farm? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of a full farm restore in the first place?

If you think about it for a moment, you probably realize that the answer is “no.” Executing any sort of restore operation from the Central Administration site requires a functional farm. After all, Central Administration doesn’t run as a stand-alone site. In addition, the SharePoint catastrophic backup and restore APIs require some form of functional SharePoint instance to execute against. Like Central Administration, the SharePoint APIs don’t run in a vacuum.

In reality, a full farm restore is more appropriately thought of as a “restore as much farm as possible” operation. A full farm restore is intended to restore Service Applications, content, and as much portable configuration as possible while leaving the target restore farm intact. Full farm restores are not intended to completely overwrite every aspect of the farm they target.

This may also help you understand why a full farm restore doesn’t restore the SharePoint farm configuration or Central Administration content databases. Overwriting the configuration database wholesale effectively destroys the target farm, whereas overwriting the Central Administration content database disrupts SharePoint because the Central Administration site is hosting the restore operation.

Executing the Full Farm Restore

To perform a catastrophic farm restore from a full farm catastrophic backup that you have, ensure that you are logged into Central Administration with an account that is a member of the Central Administration server’s local Administrators group, and execute the following series of steps:

1.	Open a browser and navigate to the Central Administration site.
2.	Depending on the configuration of both the SharePoint farm and your client browser, you may be prompted to log into the Central Administration site. If you are so prompted, supply both your user name and password. In most cases, your user name and password are your domain login credentials.
3.	When the Central Administration site loads, navigate to the Backup and Restore page by clicking the Backup and Restore link in the Quick Launch menu along the left side of the page.
4.	Click the Restore from a Backup link. It is the second link under the Farm Backup and Restore section in the main zone of the page, and it takes you to the backup selection page for restore operations.
5.	The Backup and Restore History page appears as seen in Figure 1. The Backup Directory Location text box initially contains the farm’s default backup file location, and the backup sets that are stored at the location specified are shown below the text box in order from the most recent backup set to the oldest backup set. Figure 1. The Backup and Restore History page. Tip If you don’t like all the clicking around, you can navigate directly to the backup selection page if you have the correct URL. For the fictitious farm being used in this example, the URL is http://spdev:18080/_admin/BackupHistory.aspx?restore=1&filter=1. Combine your Central Administration site’s protocol and host name information with the /_admin/Backup.aspx?restore=1&filter=1 path to construct the appropriate endpoint URL for your farm. Omitting the ?restore=1&filter=1 query string changes the look of the page slightly, but you are still able to perform a restore operation, albeit in a slightly different fashion. Leaving off the query string is also equivalent to simply clicking the View Backup and Restore History link from the Backup and Restore page.
6.	Ensure that the Backup Directory Location points to the location containing the catastrophic backup set you want to use for the restoration. If you change the location in the text box, click the Refresh button to populate the page with a list of the backup sets present at the new location.
7.	Locate the catastrophic backup set you want to use for the farm restoration in the list that appears below the Backup Directory Location text box. If you have a large number of backup sets in the location selected, you may find it easier to locate the desired backup set by reviewing some of the details for each set. Figure 2 shows a full farm catastrophic backup with expanded details that has been selected for restore. Figure 2. A backup set that is expanded and selected for restore operations.
8.	Once you have selected the desired catastrophic backup set, click the Next button to advance to the Select Component to Restore page.
9.	The Select Component to Restore page appears. The page displays the hierarchy of components that were available for backup in your farm when the catastrophic backup set was created. Components that you can select for the restore operation you are conducting have check boxes next to them. Assuming that the backup set you selected on the previous page was from a full farm catastrophic backup, all components starting at the farm level and proceeding down the hierarchy should be available for selection. If the backup set that you selected wasn’t a full farm catastrophic backup, only the subset of farm components that were captured in the backup are selectable for restore.
10.	Select the check box next to the Farm node in the component hierarchy to select the entire farm for restore. All objects that are selected for restore are shaded, as shown in Figure 3. When you have reviewed the selected components and determined that you are ready to continue, click the Next button at the bottom of the page. Figure 3. All farm components selected for restore.
11.	The Select Restore Options page appears, as shown in Figure 4. Don’t be alarmed if you begin scrolling down the page and find it to be long and intimidating. If you are performing a full farm restore and want to bring your farm back to the state it was in at the time the backup set was created, most of the settings on the page can be left as is. The first thing you need to do, though, is change the Type of Restore selection from New Configuration to Same Configuration. Making this change displays a dialog box warning you about component overwrites that occur during Same Configuration restores. Click the OK button to accept the warning and move on. Figure 4. The Select Restore Options page.
12.	The second task you must perform on the Select Restore Options page is to verify each of the application pool login names in the Login Names and Passwords section. You must also supply the password for each of the accounts associated with an application pool before proceeding. The number of accounts you must verify and supply passwords for varies according to the number of application pools that were established for your content Web applications and SharePoint’s own Service Applications.
13.	If you wanted to perform a configuration-only restore, the Data to Restore option could be changed from Restore Content and Configuration Settings to Restore Only Configuration Settings. Since the restore in this example is a full farm recovery, leave the Restore Content and Configuration Settings option selected.
14.	The text boxes in the New Names section are associated with the farm components that are being restored; frankly, there tend to be a lot of them with a full farm restore. For a Same Configuration restore, these text boxes are disabled. If you needed to change properties for one or more of the backup components during the restore operation, a New Configuration Type of Restore (specified in step 11) could be selected. Specifying a New Configuration restore allows you to do things like change the SQL Server to which databases are restored, change database names, alter service names, and more. Because this example is a full farm restore using the Same Configuration, though, the text boxes remain disabled.
15.	When you have verified your settings on the Select Restore Options page and ensured that no red exclamation marks appear in the Readiness area of the page, click the Start Restore button at the bottom of the page. SharePoint proceeds to create a timer job instance, configure it with the restoration parameters you specified, and schedule the job for one-time execution. It then redirects your browser to the Backup and Restore Job Status page. Figure 5 shows the status page after the restore operation has gotten underway. Figure 5. A full farm restore in-process.
16.	The Backup and Restore Job Status page refreshes every 30 seconds so that you can track the execution of the restore operation. When the restore operation has completed, you can review the status of each component that was restored on the status page. If additional detail is desired, you can review the log file that is generated in the specific folder of the catastrophic backup set that was used for the restore operation. The file containing additional restore detail is named sprestore.log.
17.	Review your farm’s services and Service Applications following the restore to determine if you need to start one or more of them. To do this, click on the Application Management link in the Quick Launch on the left side of the page. When the Application Management page appears, click on the Manage Services on Server link under the Service Applications section in the main page area. This opens the Services on Server page, as shown in Figure 6. If any of the listed services or Service Applications should be running but aren’t, click on their associated Start links under the Action column to start them. At the same time, be aware that a limited subset of the services and Service Applications may require some manual reconfiguration for properties and settings that could not be restored from the catastrophic backup set. Probably the most common example of such is the Secure Store Service Application. Before it functions following a restore, you must supply to the Secure Store Service Application the passphrase that was active (and manually captured) when the backup set was created. Without the pass-phrase, you cannot decrypt and use credentials stored by the Service Application. Figure 6. The Services on Server page. Note The Services on Server page in Figure 6 displays services for only one server at a time. If your farm has multiple SharePoint servers, you need to review and restart services and Service Applications on potentially each server in the farm. You can use the Server drop-down box just above the Status column to ascertain and select the active server.
18.	Finally, reestablish any trust relationships you need if your farm is publishing services for other SharePoint 2010 farms to consume or is consuming services from another farm. Note that establishing trusts is beyond the scope of the farm restore operation being conducted.

The process of restoring a farm from backup can take substantial time, and much of that time is spent in step 16. Although you don’t need to wait on the status page because the restore operation is being conducted in the background, you are somewhat limited in other activities that you can conduct across the farm. After all, the farm is in the process of changing quite a bit while the restore is being performed. As a rule of thumb, it’s best to avoid making changes and conducting operations throughout the farm until the restore has finished to avoid potential restore collisions and issues.

Restoring a Content Database for Subsequent Unattached Recovery Operations

You can restore individual content components from a catastrophic backup set using the same basic steps that were outlined for a full farm restore. The key for such restores is to select a specific component or group of components rather than the entire farm in step 9 of the walk-through.

A slight variation on the component restore theme is created when you want to restore a content database to leverage SharePoint 2010’s unattached content database recovery capabilities. In this scenario, the only component to restore is an individual content database. The twist, though, is that you cannot use the Same Configuration option during the restore. Doing so would overwrite the existing production database. Instead, you need to restore the content database using the New Configuration option to change the name of the database.

In the example that follows, a content database for the Test Publishing Site (18380) Web application is restored using a different database name. Before continuing, ensure that you are logged into Central Administration with an account that is a member of the local Administrators group on the server that houses the Central Administration site:

Restoring a Site Collection or Exported Content

Unfortunately, no mechanism exists within Central Administration to restore a site collection from a backup file (commonly with a .bak extension) or import a content migration package (typically one or more files with a .cmp extension) that was generated through a content export operation.