manual

14 www.microsoft.com/sharepoint
Figure 5: Backup and Restore Page
A complete disaster recovery plan not only includes the ability to restore servers and
databases but also how to recover smaller units of data like a single document. In the
past, this scenario proved problematic — recovering a single file often required an
administrator to restore an entire content database to a separate SharePoint farm.
Moving whole databases around and restoring them to new farms was a lot of work to
recover a small amount of data. SharePoint Server 2010 has added the ability to recover
data from an unattached content database. In other words, if you need to restore data
from a backed-up content database, you can browse the content of that content
database as long as it is attached to a computer running SQL Server, even if it is not
necessarily associated with SharePoint Server. Administrators can browse the content
database, back up a site collection, or export a site or list. After the content has been
located and saved into a separate location, it can quickly be restored to the production
database. The new backup and restore functionality will be covered in more detail later
in this guide.