HI , i would like to know the Different Backup and restore methods of a sharepoint Site/farm/sitecollection.from sharepoint Central adminstration also we have a option of backup and restore. what is the difference by doing the same by STSADM command line .some one says do the backup of WFE and Database backup.iam bit confused please can any one expline the types for backup and restore methods ,which one is the best method to use.Thanks,Raju.

The best idea would be to buy the book on this. http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=1083 (SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide (Charles River, John L. Ferringer, Sean McDonough)) As you can see from it needing an entire book there are a wide range of choices and you really need more detail than we can give here.FAQ sites: (SP 2010) http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com; (v3) http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com and (WSS 2.0) http://wssv2faq.mindsharp.com Complete Book Lists (incl. foreign language) on each site.

I completely agree with Mike's book recommendation, but I'm a little biased ;) To briefly answer your question of Central Admin vs. STSADM: Central Admin backup is a manual process; an admin has to open the site and manually initiate a backup process for the targeted components within your farm. Since this can't be scripted, CA backup is best used for one-off backups such as before and after patches, upgrades, and other major planned updates to your SharePoint environment. It also can only get as granular as content databases within your farm, you can't target individual site collections (or anything smaller than that) with it. STSADM uses the same APIs as the CA site for backup, but since its a command line tool you have a lot more scripting options (VBScript, PowerShell, Perl, etc) for calling it and running that on a regular basis via a Scheduled Task. It offers an option for you to target specific site collections within your farm, but cannot get any more granular than that. It is best used for regular protection of your SharePoint farm (nightly backups, etc), but you'll also have to script your backup file management since this is not available out of the box either. Neither tool will back up your IIS configurations, custom SharePoint code, AD, Windows Registry or other components in your environment outside of the normal SharePoint stack. You'll have to configure this on your own. Does that help give you a little better understanding of the SharePoint backup/restore situation? JohnMCTS: WSS v3, MOSS 2007, and SCOM 2007 Now Available on Amazon - The SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide.

Hi,You can back up and restore data for Office SharePoint Server 2007 by using any of the following mechanisms: Back up a farm by using built-in tools (Office SharePoint Server 2007)Restore a farm by using built-in tools (Office SharePoint Server 2007) Back up a farm by using SQL Server tools (Office SharePoint Server 2007)Restore a farm by using SQL Server tools (Office SharePoint Server 2007) Back up and restore a farm by using DPM (Office SharePoint Server 2007)Protecting Office SharePoint Server 2007 by using System Center Data Protection Manager (white paper)refer to this http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262412.aspx if you are going to build a new SharePoint environment, You can just move only your Content Databasesafter you install and configure the new SharePoint, you can do this stepyou can check my post for step by step http://ahmed-ammar.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-to-move-sharepoint-content-database.htmlBest Regards, Ammar MCT http://ahmed-ammar.blogspot.com Posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Hi Mike/John/Ammar, Thanks for your Replies.i will order a book for the same.Thanks and regards,Raju.