Sharepoint Best Practices

While it is technically possible to backup multiple Site Collections in one Bacula Sharepoint plugin backup job, this is not necessarily the best way to perform backup. It is strongly recommended that one backup Job is created for each Site Collection being backed up for the following reasons:

If one of your Site Collection fails to backup in a “multi-SiteCollections” backup job, the main Bacula job will terminate Backup OK – with warnings. The catalog’s “JobStatus” for jobs that terminate Backup OK and Backup OK – with warnings are not differentiated. They are both ’T’ so this means that you will have to carefully monitor your backup jobs logs in case some Site Collections backups fail and pay attention to the “JobErrors” field.
There is a Sharepoint plugin option abort_on_error but, if you use this option, and Site Collection number 11 in a list of 50 Site Collections fails, then the whole job will fail, and VMs 12-50 will not be backed up during that job’s run.
A 1:1 (one VM per job) configuration means that the abort_on_error option will make more sense to enable in each job, so you will immediately know when a VM fails to backup since the Bacula job will terminate with a “Backup failed” message and ’f’ in the catalog for the job.
In the case describing the 50 Site Collections, without a 1:1 configuration, there is no way to easily re-run a backup of just the 1 Site Collection that failed to backup.
With a 1:1 configuration, re-running a specific Site Collections backup job is simple to do after the cause of the failure is investigated.
With a 1:1 configuration, job metrics will have more meaning because each Site Collection will be one job, and you will know to expect a specific number of jobs each night with each one representing one machine, or Site Collection.
With a “multi-Site Collections” configuration, each Site Collection will be backed up “serially”, one at a time, disk by disk, Site Collection by Site Collection. A 1:1 configuration will allow several Site Collection backups to be run concurrently which will reduce the overall time to perform the Site Collections backups (paying close attention to SD and Sharepoint resources of course, and adjusting the number of concurrent jobs accordingly).