The SharePoint 2010 Disaster Recovery Guide is now available! In this post, I provide a small peek into the contents of the book and the people who helped make it a reality.
Since my first copy of our new book actually arrived in the mail yesterday (from Amazon.com), I think I can officially announce that the SharePoint 2010 Disaster Recovery Guide is available! Here’s a picture of it – straight out of the box:
John Ferringer and I apparently didn’t learn our lesson the first time around. When Cengage approached us about writing another version of the book, we said “yes.” We were either in denial or had repressed the memories associated with writing the first book. There were definitely some difficulties and challenges (like trying to learn the relevant pieces of the SharePoint 2010 platform while also writing about them), but we managed to pull it off again.
Of course, we couldn’t have done this without the technical prowess and patience of JD Wade. JD was our technical editor, and he had a knack for questioning any assumption or statement that wasn’t clearly backed by fact. He did a fantastic job – I couldn’t have been happier. The book’s accuracy and quality are a direct result of his contributions.
What’s Inside?
Interested in what we included? Here’s the table of contents by chapter:
SharePoint Disaster Recovery Planning and Key Concepts
SharePoint Disaster Recovery Design and Implementation
SharePoint Disaster Recovery Testing and Maintenance
SharePoint Disaster Recovery Best Practices
Windows Server 2008 Backup and Restore
Windows Server 2008 High Availability
SQL Server 2008 Backup and Restore
SQL Server 2008 High Availability
SharePoint 2010 Central Administration Backup and Restore
SharePoint 2010 Command Line Backup and Restore: PowerShell
SharePoint 2010 Disaster Recovery Development
SharePoint 2010 Disaster Recovery for End Users
Conclusion
As you can see, we’ve included a little something for just about everyone who might work with SharePoint or interface with it for disaster recovery purposes. SharePoint administrators will probably benefit the most from the book, but there are definitely sections that are of use to SharePoint developers, DR planners, and others who are interested in SharePoint from a business continuity perspective.
If you happen to pick up a copy of the book, please share your feedback with us – good, bad, ugly, or anything else you feel like sending our way! We poured a lot of time and effort into this book in an attempt to “do our part” for the community, and your thoughts and feedback mean everything to us.
In this post, I discuss SharePoint 2010’s new configuration-only backup and restore capabilities, how they work, and why they probably aren’t going to remove the need for farm configuration documentation anytime soon.
Since our SharePoint 2010 Disaster Recovery Guide is written, starched, pressed, and ready to wear, I thought it was time to get back to some of the blogging I promised to start doing again once the book was finished. I guess that if I didn’t have something to write, I simply wouldn’t know what to do with myself. <insert smirk here>
Motivation For This Post
SharePoint 2010’s configuration-only backup and restore capabilities are on a long list of topics I’ve been meaning to blog about, but in all honesty it wasn’t at the top of that list. I’ve been seeing the topic start to get some real attention in a number of forums, though, from folks like Todd Klindt (in one of his recent netcasts) and Benjamin Athawes (in his blog and in the helpful replies he’s been providing out in Microsoft’s TechNet forums).
It seems that many folks in the SharePoint community have heard about configuration-only backup and restore, and I think there’s an awful lot of hope that it will help with some of the problems we faced with SharePoint 2007. By the time you finish reading this post, I hope to impart a solid understanding of what configuration-only backup and restore will – and won’t – do for you.
The Elephant In The Room
Before I go any further, let me address the question that I suspect the overwhelming majority of you probably want an answer to:
Will configuration-only backup and restore let me clone my SharePoint 2010 farm?
The quick answer: no. At the risk of being a bit flippant, I’ll include a slightly longer answer: heck no – not even close.
When configuration-only backup and restore was introduced to the world, it promised so much. I remember hearing the discussion of “farm templates” and of “cloning configuration.” I remember sitting through Bill Baer’s business continuity management (BCM) session at the SharePoint Conference in 2009 and thinking about all the things I was going to do with the new capability.
In light of what I now know about configuration-only backup and restore, I went back to the recorded SPC sessions (including SPC311 – Bill’s BCM session) to make sure I wasn’t hearing things. I wasn’t. My guess is that the initial vision for configuration-only backup and restore had to get scaled-back prior to the product becoming generally available. Maybe the team ran out of time, maybe they hit technical hurdles, or perhaps it was a combination of the two. Regardless, the capability in its current form isn’t quite what I had hoped it would be.
Enough with the hand-waving. Let’s dive in.
High-Level: What Is Configuration-Only Backup and Restore?
For a brief primer on configuration-only backup and restore, check out the “Backup and recovery overview (SharePoint 2010)” article on TechNet. If you don’t want to take the time to read the article, though, I’ll sum it up for you: a configuration-only backup and restore allows you to extract portable configuration settings from a SharePoint 2010 farm configuration database and apply those settings to a different farm. The promise, as indicated earlier, is that you could effectively “clone” the configuration of a farm. The configuration template that would be generated from this process could then be applied to other farms to create copies of the original farm’s settings and configuration. This would be extremely beneficial when duplicating environments (e.g., creating staging and testing environments that match a production environment), building development and demo virtual machines (VMs), and more.
Those of you who have worked with SharePoint 2007 recognize the leap forward that this represents. Anyone who has spent any amount of time exploring SharePoint backup and recovery knows that farm configuration databases are tied to their SharePoint environments. Microsoft doesn’t support transplanting one farm’s configuration database into another farm; most of the time, it simply wouldn’t work. Even if you could get it to work through some extremely impressive techno-jujitsu, you’d be in a horribly unsupported state as far as Microsoft support was concerned.
What Does It Look Like?
Configuration-only backup and restore in SharePoint 2010 is an extension to the existing catastrophic backup and restore capabilities located in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration and Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.Backup namespaces. The processes and mechanisms that allow you to create farm-level backups from Central Administration (through “Farm Backup and Restore”), PowerShell (via Backup-SPFarm), and STSADM.exe (via STSADM –o backup in catastrophic mode) are the same ones that are employed in configuration-only backups.
In fact, the backup sets that are generated from a configuration-only backup are basically the same, structurally speaking, as those that are generated from a “normal” (content + configuration) catastrophic backup. One easy way to determine the nature of a backup, though, is to crack open the backup location’s table of contents file (spbrtoc.xml) and examine the value within the <SPConfigurationOnly /> element for a given backup or restore run (represented by a <SPHistoryObject /> element).
For example, this particular backup run was clearly a configuration-only backup because its <SPConfigurationOnly /> element contains a value of True. [sourcecode language=”xml” highlight=”9″]<SPHistoryObject>
<SPId>571d2ad2-f485-46de-918e-653e8868c8bc</SPId>
<SPRequestedBy>SPDC\s0ladmin</SPRequestedBy>
<SPBackupMethod>Full</SPBackupMethod>
<SPRestoreMethod>None</SPRestoreMethod>
<SPStartTime>08/18/2010 16:15:12</SPStartTime>
<SPFinishTime>08/18/2010 16:15:37</SPFinishTime>
<SPIsBackup>True</SPIsBackup>
<SPConfigurationOnly>True</SPConfigurationOnly>
<SPBackupDirectory>e:\temp\spbr0001\</SPBackupDirectory>
<SPDirectoryName>spbr0001</SPDirectoryName>
<SPDirectoryNumber>1</SPDirectoryNumber>
<SPTopComponent>Farm</SPTopComponent>
<SPTopComponentId>7850df11-60ef-460c-ab4a-9b7b9f2f735f</SPTopComponentId>
<SPWarningCount>0</SPWarningCount>
<SPErrorCount>0</SPErrorCount>
</SPHistoryObject>[/sourcecode] If you browse the folder containing the backup set that is generated from a configuration-only backup, you’ll see the expected array of sequentially numbered hexadecimal .bak files, as well as a log file (spbackup.log) and backup component hierarchy file (spbackup.xml).
The .bak files themselves contain XML-serialized representations of various farm objects that were captured during the configuration backup process:
Again, this is all very similar to a standard catastrophic farm backup. The one notable absence in the backup set that is produced during a configuration-only backup is that of SQL Server database backup files that begin (internally) with a telltale TAPE header. The absence of these files is expected, though, since configuration-only backups operate on farm configuration settings and metadata – not the content and other data that is housed primarily in SQL Server databases.
“Wait,” you might be saying, “service applications typically have quite a bit of configuration data, and much of that data is housed in SQL Server databases. Wouldn’t those databases be captured by the configuration-only backup process?” Hold that question – I’ll be addressing it in a short bit.
A Quick Peek At What’s Going On Under The Hood
To better understand how configuration-only backup and restore works, it helps to dive below the backup set and into the SharePoint object model to see what’s actually happening. If you’re not a developer, no worries – I’ll try to keep this simple.
The type that is the backbone of configuration-only backup and restore operations is the IBackupRestoreConfiguration interface. Classes in the SharePoint object model can implement this interface (and supply a CanBackupRestoreAsConfiguration property value of true) if they wish to meet the bare minimum requirements for inclusion in configuration-only backup and restore operations.
If you’ve worked with catastrophic backup and restore in the SharePoint object model before, this interface name may seem a little familiar to you – even if it isn’t. That’s because extending the native catastrophic backup and restore functionality of SharePoint to include new content classes is done through the similarly named IBackupRestore interface. IBackupRestore came before IBackupRestoreConfiguration, and the latter is actually derived from the former. The patterns of interaction between the runtime backup objects and objects that implement these two interfaces is very similar – as you might expect given their inheritance relationship.
So you might be wondering, “So what? I don’t plan to build configuration-only backup and restore-capable components. Why are you going through all of this.” The answer to that question is relatively easy to answer: we can get a pretty clear understanding of what is actually included in configuration-only backup and restore operations by looking at the SharePoint classes that implement the IBackupRestoreConfiguration interface.
Hold onto the concept of examining types that implement IBackupRestoreConfiguration; we’ll be coming back to it in just a second.
What Does A Configuration-Only Backup Actually Capture? – Part 1
Let’s leave the SharePoint object model and come back up to ground level for a moment.
In plain English, configuration-only backup and restore is basically supposed to address the “I need to create a template of my farm” pain point we felt with SharePoint 2007. Does it? What gap is filled by the capability according to Microsoft?
If you read the TechNet article I linked to earlier, you’ll find just five types of settings (or configuration data items) that are actually listed as included in a configuration-only backup:
Antivirus
Information rights management (IRM)
Outbound e-mail settings (only restored when performing an "overwrite").
Customizations deployed as trusted solutions
Diagnostic logging
I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t exactly line up too well with the list of things I’d want to replicate from Farm A to Farm B if I were actually trying to clone Farm A configuration settings. Don’t get me wrong: several of the items listed are things I would want to bring across (especially the customizations in the farm solution store), but there are a whole host of additional things I’d want to see.
What Does A Configuration-Only Backup Actually Capture? – Part 2
The five bullet points I just supplied aren’t entirely well-defined, and they’re more than a little “light” in terms of farm configuration data. Let’s define the list a bit more clearly by seeing which classes in the SharePoint object model actually implement the required IBackupRestoreConfiguration interface.
When I fire-up Reflector and analyze the types that use the IBackupRestoreConfiguration interface, I come up with the following classes (ignoring the SPBackupRestore type, since its ImplementsIBackupRestoreConfiguration method only checks to see whether or not other objects themselves actually implement the interface):
Each of these classes is capable of participating in a configuration-only backup because it implements IBackupRestoreConfiguration. The list is longer than the five bullets I mentioned earlier, but many of the classes cited can be grouped into common areas of functionality. The SPSolution, SPSolutionCollection, and SPSolutionLanguagePack types are associated with trusted solutions (the farm solution store), for example, while the SPDiagnosticsServiceBase type is tied to trace log and event throttling management (i.e., diagnostic logging). A simple one-to-one mapping between classes and settings areas (that you might find in Central Administration) doesn’t actually exist.
Identifying what is included in a configuration-only backup isn’t quite a quick and easy affair.
What Doesn’t A Configuration-Only Backup Capture?
Sometimes it’s simply easier to talk about what a thing isn’t rather than what it is. As you’re probably coming to see, configuration-only backup and restore is one of those things.
For those who hoped that configuration-only backup and restore would deliver us to the promised land of SharePoint farm templates and full configuration replication, the first signs of trouble in paradise come by reading the implementation notes for the IBackupRestoreConfiguration interface. In essence they state that you shouldn’t be implementing the interface to capture configuration settings unless the following three conditions are true for the settings in question:
The settings you’re trying to preserve are only configuration settings – not content like lists, documents, etc.
The settings you want to capture are scoped to the entire farm or the Content Publishing Web Service (i.e., they apply equally to all non-Central Admin Web applications and the site collections contained within them – not to just a subset)
The settings aren’t tied to server names or your specific SharePoint farm topology
That list starts “simple” and ends “rough.” With those three bullets, we can instantly rule-out configuration data that is tied to individual Web applications, content databases, site collections, and everything else below them. Configuration-only backup and restore won’t protect your per-Web application settings, either, including alternate access mappings (AAMs).
I’m making a special point of highlighting AAMs because configuration-only backup and restore was initially advertised as being capable of capturing these mappings. Sure, you can view AAMs within Central Administration and may think that they’re maintained at the farm level, but they aren’t – they’re tied to specific Web applications. AAMs for a Web application are represented (within the object model) as an instance of the SPAlternateUrlCollection class. The SPAlternateUrlCollection isn’t on the list of IBackupRestoreConfiguration implementers provided earlier, nor are its parent types (most notably the SPWebApplication type through its AlternateUrls property). Net effect: it isn’t included in configuration-only backup and restore operations.
Since cloning a SharePoint farm usually involves taking it from one environment to another, bullet #3 is a rather big sticking point, as well. Configuration-only backup and restore won’t handle anything that includes a server name, IP address, or any other environmentally-dependent setting. The reason is pretty simple – how would SharePoint know how to actually re-wire that stuff (in a new environment) on restore?
Ouch.
Okay, What About Service Applications?
The Service Application Framework is new to SharePoint 2010, and it represents a major step forward in correcting many of the performance, configuration, and scalability limits of MOSS 2007’s shared service provider (SSP) model. If you’ve touched SharePoint 2010 in any form, chances are you’ve at least stumbled into service applications in some form. Examples include the Managed Metadata Service, Business Data Connectivity (BCS) Services, and Search.
Although the Service Application Framework has been engineered to participate in normal (content+configuration) catastrophic backup and restore operations, it doesn’t do so through the standard IBackupRestore interface. Developers of service application and related classes can adorn their classes with a couple of different attributes (IisWebServiceApplicationBackupBehaviorAttribute and IIsWebServiceApplicationProxyBackupBehaviorAttribute – not exactly “short and sweet” in the name department), and they get backup and restore integration as a freebie. This is a big relief for developers, because properly implementing the IBackupRestore interface in their classes is anything but trivial.
There is a downside to the attribute-based backup and restore approach as its implemented, though: the Service Application Framework simply doesn’t participate in configuration-only backup and restore. When you execute a configuration-only backup, you won’t capture any configuration data tied to search, BCS, managed metadata, web analytics, Excel services, or any of the other service applications.
Double ouch.
The Verdict On Configuration-Only Backup And Restore
I’ll start by apologizing if this post dashed your hopes. Believe me when I say that I had very high hopes for configuration-only backup and restore, as well. Cloning farms by hand is painful work; I’ve done it enough times to know that much.
Since configuration-only backup and restore doesn’t actually cover any configuration data tied to service applications and individual Web applications, cloning a farm in SharePoint 2010 is still going to be a largely manual affair. Scripting can (and probably should) play a large role, and so will documentation.
There, I said it – the ugly “d” word. Documentation.
Documentation continues to play a big role in capturing configuration data in SharePoint 2010, but that doesn’t mean you have to resort to taking notes or capturing screenshots en masse.
Microsoft has (indirectly) acknowledged that configuration-only backup and restore isn’t going to round up all of our desired configuration settings, and they’ve attempted to lend us a hand through some PowerShell scripting. If you haven’t yet reviewed Microsoft’s farm documentation script on TechNet, I highly recommend that you check it out. Saying that the script’s treatment of farm configuration data is “extensive” is kind of like saying that a tsunami is a “big wave” – it doesn’t do it justice.
I also want to be clear and say that despite the limitations I’ve described, I still think that configuration-only backup and restore is worth some serious investigation for anyone trying to do template creation, cloning, and disaster recovery work. Given my focus on disaster recovery, for example, the ability to get a farm’s solution store backed-up in a form that can be restored easily at a later time is a huge benefit – one that would really ease the process of farm recovery in a true disaster scenario.
In this post, I discuss my quest to determine whether or not site collection backups properly capture workflow information in SharePoint 2010. TechNet made a point of saying they didn’t, but Joel Oleson said they did. Who was right?
Do you trust TechNet? I generally do, as I figure the good folks at Microsoft are doing their best to disseminate reliable information to those of us working with their products. As I recently learned, though, even the information that appears on TechNet needs some cross-checking once in a while.
Bear with me, as this post is equal parts narrative and data discussion. If you don’t like stories and want to cut straight to the chase, though, simply scroll down to the section titled “The Conclusion” for the key takeaway.
Site Collection Backup Primer
For those who aren’t overly familiar with site collection backups, it’s probably worth spending a moment discussing them a bit before going any further. Site collection backups are, after all, at the heart of this blog post.
What is a site collection backup? It is basically what you would expect from its name: a backup of a specific SharePoint site collection. These backups can be used to restore or overwrite a site collection if it becomes lost or corrupt, and they can also be used to copy site collections from one web application (or farm) to another.
Anytime you execute one of the following operations, you’re performing a site collection backup:
from the command line: STSADM.exe –o backup –url <url> –filename <filename>
through PowerShell in SharePoint 2010: Backup-SPSite <url> –Path <filepath>
Using the “Perform a site collection backup” link in SharePoint 2010 Central Administration
When a site collection backup is executed, a single file with a .bak extension is generated that contains the entire contents of the site collection targeted. This file can be freely copied and moved around as needed. Aside from some recommendations regarding the maximum size of the site collection captured using this approach (15GB and under in SharePoint 2007, 85GB and under in SharePoint 2010), the backups themselves are really quite handy for both protection and site collection migration operations.
A Little Background
John Ferringer and I have been plugging away at the SharePoint 2010 Disaster Recovery Guide for quite some time. As you might imagine, the writing process involves a lot of research, hands-on experimentation, and fact-checking. This is especially true for a book that’s being written about a platform (SharePoint 2010) that is basically brand new in the marketplace.
While researching backup-related changes for the book, I made a special mental note of the following change regarding site collection backups in SharePoint 2010:
Workflows are not included in site collection backups
This stuck with me when I read it, because I hadn’t recalled any such statement being made with regard to site collection backups in SharePoint 2007. Since Microsoft made a special note of pointing out this limitation for SharePoint 2010, though, I figured it was important to keep in mind. Knowing that workflows had changed from 2007 to 2010, I reasoned that the new limitation was probably due to some internal workflow plumbing alterations that adversely affected the backup process.
The Setup
A couple of weeks back, I was presenting at SharePoint Saturday Ozarks alongside an awesome array of other folks (including Joel Oleson) from the SharePoint community. Due to a speaker no-show in an early afternoon slot, Mark Rackley (the event’s one-man force-of-nature organizer) decided to hold an “ask the experts” panel where attendees could pitch questions at those of us who were willing to share what we knew.
A number of good questions came our way, and we all did our best to supply our experiences and usable advice. Though I don’t recall the specific question that was asked in one particular case, I do remember advising someone to perform a site collection backup before attempting to do whatever it was they wanted to do. After sharing that advice, though, things got a little sketchy. The following captures the essence of the exchange that took place between Joel and me:
Me: <to the attendee> Site collection backups don’t capture everything in SharePoint 2010, though, so be careful.
Joel: No, site collection backups are full-fidelity.
Me: TechNet specifically indicates that workflows aren’t covered in site collection backups with SharePoint 2010.
Joel: No, the backups are still full fidelity.
Me: <blank stare>
The discussion topic and associated questions for the panel quickly changed, but my brain was still stripping a few gears trying to reconcile what I’d read on TechNet with what Joel was saying.
After the session, I forwarded the TechNet link I had quoted to Joel and asked if he happened to have an “inside track” or perhaps some information I didn’t have access to. We talked about the issue for a while at the hotel a little later on, but the only thing that we could really conclude was that more research was needed to see if site collection backups had in fact changed with SharePoint 2010. Before taking off that weekend, we decided to stay in contact and work together to get some answers.
Under The Hood
To understand why this issue bothered me so much, remember that I’m basically in the middle of co-authoring a book on the topic of disaster recovery – a topic that is intimately linked to backup and restore operations. The last thing I would ever want to do is write a book that contains ambiguous or (worse) flat-out wrong information about the book’s central topic.
To get to the heart of the matter, I decided to start where most developers would: with the SharePoint object model. In both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010, the object model types that are used to backup and export content typically fall into one of two general categories:
Catastrophic Backup and Restore API. These types are located in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.Backup namespace, and they provide SharePoint’s full-fidelity backup and restore functions. Backup and restore operations take place on content components such as content databases, service applications, and the entire SharePoint farm. Catastrophic backup and restore operations are full-fidelity, meaning that no data is lost or selectively ignored during a backup and subsequent restore. By default, catastrophic backup and restore operation don’t get any more granular than a content database. If you want to protect something within a content database, such as a site collection, sub-site, or list, you have to backup the entire content database containing the target object(s).
Content Deployment API. The member types of this API (also known internally at Microsoft as the PRIME API) reside within the Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment namespace and are used for granular content export and import operations. The exports that are created by the types in this namespace target objects from the site collection level all the way down to the field level – typically webs, lists, list items, etc. Content Deployment exports are not full-fidelity and are commonly used for moving content around more than they are for actual backup and restore operations.
So, where does this leave site collection backups? In truth, site collection backups don’t fit into either of these categories. They are a somewhat unusual case, both in SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010.
Whether a site collection backup is initiated through STSADM, PowerShell, or Central Administration, a single method is called on the SPSiteCollection type which resides in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration namespace. This is basically the signature of the method:
To carry out a site collection backup, all that is needed is the URL of the site collection, the filename that will be used for the resultant backup file, and a TRUE or FALSE to indicate whether an overwrite should occur if the selected file already exists.
If you were to pop open Reflector and drill into the Backup method on the SPSiteCollection type, you wouldn’t get very far before running into a wall at the SPRequest type. SPRequest is a managed wrapper around the take-off point for a whole host of external calls, and the execution of the Backup method is actually handled in unmanaged legacy code. Examining the internals of what actually takes place during a site collection backup (or restore, for that matter) simply isn’t possible with Reflector.
Since the internals of the Backup method weren’t available for reflective analysis, I was forced to drop back and punt in order to determine how site collection backups and workflow interacted within SharePoint 2010.
Testing Factors
I knew that I was going to have to execute backup and restore tests at some point; I was just hoping that I would be a bit more informed (through object model inspection) about where I needed to focus my efforts. Without any visibility into the internals of the site collection backup process, though, I didn’t really have much to start with.
Going into the testing process, I knew that I wasn’t going to have enough time to perform exhaustive testing for every scenario, execution path, variable, and edge-case that could be relevant to the backup and restore processes. I had to develop a testing strategy that would hit the likely problem areas as quickly (and with as few runs) as possible.
After some thought, I decided that these points were important facets to consider and account for while testing:
Workflow Types. Testing the most common workflow types was important. I knew that I would need to test at least one out of the box (OOTB) workflow type. I also decided that I needed to test at least one instance of each type of workflow that could be created through SharePoint Designer (SPD) 2010; that meant testing a list-bound workflow, a site collection workflow, and a reusable workflow. I decided that custom code workflows, such as those that might be created through Visual Studio, were outside the scope of my testing.
Workflow Data. In order to test the impact of backup and restore operations on a workflow, I obviously had to ensure that one or more workflows were in-place within the site collection targeted for backup. Having a workflow attached to a list would obviously test the static data portions of the workflow, but there was other workflow-related data that had to be considered. In particular, I decided that the testing of both workflow history information and in-process workflow state were important. More on the workflow state in a bit …
Backup and Restore Isolation. While testing, it would be important to ensure that backup operations and restore operations impacted one another (or rather, had the potential to impact one another) as little as possible. Though backups and restores occurred within the same virtual farm, I isolated them to the extent that I could. Backups were performed in one web application, and restores were performed in a separate web application. I even placed each web application in its own (IIS) application pool – just to be sure. I also established a single VM snapshot starting point; after each backup and restore test, I rolled back to the snapshot point to ensure that nothing remained in the farm (or VM, for that matter) that was tied to the previous round of testing.
Testing Procedure
I created a single Publishing Portal, bolted a couple of sub-sites and Document Libraries into it, and used it as the target for my site collection backup operations. The Document Library that I used for workflow testing varied between tests; it was not held constant and did change according to the needs of each specific test.
I ran four different workflow test scenarios. My OOTB workflow scenario involved testing the page approval workflow for publishing pages. My other three SPD workflow tests (list-bound, site collection, and reusable workflow) all involved the same basic set of workflow steps:
Wait five minutes
Create a To Do item (which had to be completed to move on)
Wait five more minutes
Add a comment to the workflow target
In both the OOTB workflow and SPD workflow scenarios, I wanted to perform backups while workflows were basically “in flight” to see how workflow state would or wouldn’t be impacted by the backup and restore processes. For the publishing approval workflow, this meant taking a site collection backup while at least one page was pending approval. For the SPD workflows, it meant capturing a backup while at least one workflow instance was in a five minute wait period and another was waiting on the completion of the To Do item.
Prior to executing a backup in each test case, I ran a couple of workflow instances from start to finish. This ensured that I had some workflow history information to capture and restore.
Once site collection backups were captured in each test case, I restored them into the empty web application. I then opened the restored site collection to determine what did and didn’t get transcribed through the backup and restore process.
Results Of Testing
In each workflow case (OOTB and all three SPD workflows), all workflow information that I could poke and prod appeared to survive the backup and restore process without issue. Workflow definition data was preserved, and workflow history came over intact. Even more impressive, though, was the fact that in-process workflow state was preserved. SPD workflow steps that were in the middle of a wait period when a backup was taken completed their wait period after restore and moved on. To Do items that were waiting for user intervention continued to wait and then proceeded to the next step when they were marked as completed in the restored site collection.
In addition, new instances of each workflow type could be created and started in both site collections following the backup and restore operations. The backup and subsequent restore didn’t appear to have any effect on either the source or destination.
Though my testing wasn’t exhaustive, it did cast a doubt on the absolute nature of the statement made on TechNet regarding site collection backups failing to include workflows.
Joel’s Legwork
While I was conducting my research and testing, Joel was leveraging his network of contacts and asking folks at Microsoft for the real story behind site collection backups and workflow. He made a little progress with each person he spoke to, and in the end, he managed to get someone to go on the record.
The Conclusion
The official word from Microsoft is that the TechNet note indicating that site collection backups don’t include workflows is a misprint. In reality, the point that should have been conveyed through TechNet was that content exports (via the Content Deployment API) don’t include workflows – a point that is perfectly understandable considering that the Content Deployment API doesn’t export or import with full-fidelity. Microsoft indicated that they’ll be correcting the error, and TechNet may have been corrected by the time you read this.
My takeaway on this: if something on TechNet (or anywhere else on the web) doesn’t quite add up, it never hurts to test and seek additional information from others in the community who are knowledgeable on the subject matter. In this case, it made a huge difference.
