My SharePoint experience has been from the developer prospective. However, each SharePoint position I have held required solid administrative knowledge. This is due to my role as a backup resource for the designated administrator or fulfilling the administrative role due to a temporary vacancy. I have made it a point to increase my administrative knowledge by reading SharePoint technical references. SharePoint 2010 Disaster Recovery Guide is simply the best resource available on the topic.
I am an avid reader (read at least one technical book per month) of SharePoint 2010 development books and Visual Studio 2010 books in general. SharePoint books rarely touches on disaster recovery and those that do limit their reference to a few paragraphs. This book is devoted entirely to the subject and as a second release, its concepts are tried and true.
I have the responsibility of creating the SharePoint 2010 disaster revovery (DR) farm and the associated procedures for quick recovery at my company. To ensure that best practices are followed and the DR process works as expected, I did a significantly amount of research. This book was my single best source of reference.
Rather than jumping into the technical aspects of the DR process the authors wisely chose to devote the first few chapters to understanding and preparing for DR. Chapter 1 focus on the planning process by identifying and explaining key concepts, the documentation needed to put a plan together, and associated dependencies and interfaces. Chapter 2 focuses on the design and implementation. Chapter 3 is devoted to the preparation effort and how best to conduct your test runs. Chapter 4, the last of the preparatory chapters before getting into the technical aspects of the DR process, discusses best practices. Best practices takes into account your scope, budget, IT infrastructure, available resources and concludes on the subject of "no one size fits all". These chapters are an excellent source for seasoned pros and first time practitioners.
Chapter 5 and subsequent chapters is an easy read for those with technical experience. The chapter focuses on what tools (OS features, roles, etc.) are needed to conduct backup and restore of the server operating system. Chapter 6 advances to High Availability at the server level. SharePoint 2010 offers more features than the previous release, some of which allows for a speedy DR completion. Chapter 7 delves into one of these features which allows for the backup and restore effort on the SQL server side. Chapter 8 advances the subject of SQL server by focusing on SQL Server High Availability. In addition to re-establishing a farm during DR, this chapter also talks about how to use the SQL tools to establish a new farm (Test, Dev, etc) that utilizes the same configuration as the production environment.
Chapter 8 also discusses reasons why you do not want to just copy the configuration databases from the production environment to a target environment when creating a new farm. This practice is good for content databases but configuration is specific to each farm and should not be replicated using SQL tools. The best way of copying the portable configuration information from production to establish a new farm (or from another farm to production) is to use the SharePoint 2010 backup tools such as Central Administration or SharePoint PowerShell. Chapter 9 talks about using Central Administration to do backups and restores. And Chapter 10 focuses on backups and restores using PowerShell. Chapter 11 discusses how other tools can be valuable in various aspects of DR. Chapter 12 is an example of how the authors go the extra mile to ensure complete discussion of the subject. Chapter 12 focuses on tools available to the typical end user for backup and recovery effort at the user level.
This is a great book for anyone involved with establishing or maintaining the SharePoint DR process for their company. It does not matter if your experience is on the business analysis side or the technical side, this book is an excellent resource. My goal is to always have a copy of this book that's relevant to the current release of SharePoint.
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