When was the last time you deleted something in SharePoint?

I can say with confidence that I have never deleted anything crucial in SharePoint, though I once accidentally deleted some files on a Wang, which almost sounds like a bad joke waiting for a punch line.

What a better day I would have had had I deleted something in SharePoint and had the good fortune to work where the SharePoint team had implemented a SharePoint backup solution of some kind.

As you know, there are quite a few out there, but I’d never heard of this one until I randomly went trawling for solutions: It’s called NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup.

Recently,  Syncsort, the company responsible for this solution, reported that it had enhanced the solution for SharePoint. Now NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup includes “virtual node” technology to protect SharePoint by automatically discovering all the servers and server roles in a farm, and protecting them under a single check-box item.

This is probably so your lowest-common-denominator backup admin can never again say he “forgot” to back up, say, one of your most crucial SharePoint farms.

NSB restores all aspects of a SharePoint environment including individual objects or documents, a SharePoint site, a database, or an entire farm. It integrates with VMware environments, enabling conversion of a SharePoint backup, whether physical or virtual, to a virtual machine.

NSB also protects physical servers, enabling a full system bare metal restore from a backup job. It’s got deduplication technology, which one supposes should be de rigueur these days in dealing with the sticky flood of data in our lives.

It also includes NetApp SnapMirror replication software to allow backups to be replicated to an alternate site for full, multi-site disaster recovery should your SharePoint stuff be located in, say, southern Canada, Bangladesh, the northeastern quadrant of the US, or anywhere in Florida. It supports both SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2007.