Sharepoint 2007 Backup Solutions? [closed]
I've had a quick look at Microsoft's Data Protection Manager. It requires you to have a second SharePoint server as an intermediate restore point, but it does look like the goods when it comes to easy restore (and includes backup/restore functionality for other products).
Other good products are DocAve and Quest Recovery Manager. DocAve can do a lot more but carries a higher price tag. Quest is similar to DPM in that it uses an intermediate database.
I personally don't use an external backup. My backup consist of two levels:
Full SQL server backup - complete, the entire instance, at a specific moment (I don't want any inconsistency between the content and the configuration). This is for DRP reasons. I hope never to use it. If you keep your front-end servers exactly as they were (at the backup point) - there is no problem with restoring the configuration db. The sharepoint system can't tell the difference... (been there).
Site collection backups - using stsadm -o backup (not export!). This is for the day-to-day use, for cases when users deleted sites, edited documents (and want the older version...) etc. When that happens I restore the site collection to a testing server, and send the file to the user.
For documents and sites deletion - the recycle bin (and the administrator's second stage) is perfectly fine. In fact, since MOSS 2007 and the recycle bin, restoring sites became very very rare.