MS SharePoint backup requirements

Availability

The feature is available on the server versions of Windows. The whole SharePoint Server is included into the backup selection. You can view the sites inside.

Supported versions

We support the following MS SharePoint versions: 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016.

Host system

  1. Backup Manager must be installed on the same SharePoint server that you want to back up
  2. SQL databases for SharePoint must be located on the same SharePoint server that you want to back up. Multi-tier configuration is not supported
  3. The names of SQL databases for MS SharePoint must not start or end with a space (this is a Microsoft limitation)

Free space

There must be a sufficient amount of free space in the VSS Shadow Copy storage area.

This is because MS SharePoint backups depend on VSS snapshots. When a backup session completes, snapshots are automatically deleted.

VSS writers

MS SharePoint backups depend on 3 VSS writers:

  1. SqlServerWriter
  2. SharePoint Services Writer (in MS SharePoint 2013, it is disabled by default and needs to be registered – learn more)
  3. OSearch VSS Writer

You can check the availability of these writers through a system console, for example Command Prompt:

vssadmin list writers

All the writers must be listed in the response. This is crucial for successful backups.

Learn more about the VSS writers for MS SharePoint backups

Recovery

Instructions on restoring data from this data source can be found on Recovering data in Backup Manager.