About SharePoint protection

The SharePoint agent provides protection of services and resources in a Microsoft standalone or multi-server SharePoint farm. The SharePoint agent is a component of the Windows core agent. It is fully integrated into the backup system, from which all configuration and management tasks are performed.

In a SharePoint deployment, the primary node installs SharePoint services on other member servers and initiates administrative commands to manage the farm. The Central Administration service runs on the primary node to perform farm management. All nodes directly access the SharePoint central configuration database for configuration of services, features, database connections, and the like. The central configuration database resides either on the primary node or on a stand-alone SQL server. Unitrends protects the farm from the primary node, where administrative commands are run to coordinate the backup of data across other nodes in the farm.

The agent leverages SharePoint’s STSADM and PowerShell (SharePoint 2013 and higher) tools to perform backup and recovery operations to ensure application consistency. The agent invokes commands on the SharePoint primary node and supplies STSADM or PowerShell a local share target (/backups/rae/<client_name>/<instance>) so that jobs run on the backup system itself.

The agent works with STSADM or PowerShell to backup the SharePoint-specific data and files on each node in the farm. STSADM or PowerShell discovers the online nodes and performs backup operations to the local backup system share. If a node is not available, the backup continues without error. The resulting backup does not include any nodes that were unavailable when the backup ran.

Note: SharePoint protection includes SharePoint data only. To protect an entire node in the farm, register the node to the backup system as a separate client and run file-level backups.

Note about protecting SharePoint farms: Full catastrophic farm recovery can only be performed for deployments where the installation type is single server. To check your installation type, see To determine the SharePoint installation type.