The following best practices help you use the Agent for Microsoft SharePoint effectively:

• Use an account with local administrative privileges for each member of the SharePoint farm for SharePoint backup and restore jobs.

• Make SharePoint backup selections from the appropriate SharePoint farm resource container in the list of servers on the Backup and Restore tab instead of selecting individual SharePoint servers. The SharePoint farm resource container represents the entire farm topology in your environment, including all of the SharePoint resources that reside on a single computer. When you select the SharePoint resources from the farm resource container, you ensure that you select all available SharePoint resources for backup.

• Use the Backup Exec SQL Agent, in addition to the SharePoint farm resources, to back up the default Microsoft SQL Server databases for instances on which SharePoint data resides. Back up the master, model, and msdb databases to fully protect each SQL instance for disaster recovery purposes.

• Keep a record of all service packs and hot fixes that are installed on the SharePoint server when you perform backups. SharePoint restore jobs may not complete successfully if the databases were backed up with different patch levels.

• Perform full system backups of the SharePoint servers, including System State, system volume, and any other volumes that contain SharePoint-related files and folders. When you make full system backups, you fully protect the entire SharePoint environment.

• Ensure that Granular Recovery Technology (GRT) is enabled before you run backups if you intend to be able to restore individual items. GRT is enabled by default for the SharePoint Agent . You can enable or disable GRT for SharePoint globally in the Backup Job Defaults dialog box or on the Backup Options dialog box for individual backup jobs.

• Duplicate GRT-enabled backup sets to disk storage first and then run the restore jobs from the disk-based backup sets, if you must run multiple restores from the same backup set on tape. GRT restores from backup sets on tape must be staged to disk first. The staged data is not retained after the restore completes. Duplicating the backup sets to disk storage eliminates the need to stage the data multiple times and improves the performance of the restore jobs.