SharePoint 2016 Central Admin - Backup And Restore - Perform A Site Collection Backup

When you click on the "Perform a site collection backup" link, you will land on the Site collection backup page. This page will let you take the backup of site collection.

Site collection Backup Page’s direct link - /_admin/SiteCollectionBackup.aspx

Backup of the SharePoint farm is always highly recommended and best approach to safeguard the environment but sometimes, you need a site collection backup. On this page, you can take the backup of the site collection. This option allows the user to backup a single site collection in a given time. This option is helpful in cases when the administrator wants to move the site collection into a  different farm or copy a site collection on different URL (other methods are also available for copying a site collection but backup and restore of a site collection is always better).

Prerequisites

You have to ensure the following things before performing the backup of Site collection.

• Log on the Central admin with the farm Admin account
• If you create a folder on the Server, then make sure that the farm admin (Account running the SharePoint Timer Service) has read and write access to that folder.
• If you are using the network shared folder, then make sure the farm admin should have read and write permissions to it.

Things to know

There are a couple of things you should know before starting the backup of the site collections.

• When you perform the backup, it might put the site into read only state to prevent data insertion in the site collection. This lock status will be released once the backup is successfully completed.
• It is highly recommended to perform the backups in non-peak hours as backup process requires the resources on SharePoint Servers as well as on the SQL Server.
• As a best practice, never use the system drive for backup as you may see the space issue which can interrupt the operations and sometimes, low disk / zero disk space on the systems cause the operating system crash.

Backup of Site collection

Let’s take the backup of the Team site collection (team.krossfarm.com) by following the instructions below.

• Log on to Central Admin with farm admin account
• Browse to "Perform a site collection backup" page.
• On this page, enter the following details.
  
  
  1. First, select the correct web application; in our case, (team.krossfarm.com).
  2. In the file name field, enter the complete path where you want to store the backup file.
  3. If you have already created backup file with same name but now want to re-use that file name again, then check the checkbox option “overwrite existing file”.
  4. Click "Start Backup".
     
     
     
• On this "Granular Backup Job Status" page, you will see the status of the backup job. This page is set to auto refresh after every 30 seconds but you have an option to refresh it manually by pressing F5 button. Under the Site collection backup, you will see the current job status and also the previous job status (if previous job was successful).
  
  
  • Under the current job, you will see the following information.
    
    
    • Status
      This will tell in which state the job is; i.e., Operation initializing, or backup running etc.
      
      
    • Requested by
      This will display the name of the user who performs this step. I.e KROSSFARM\KFInst
      
      
    • Site collection URL
      It is the URL of the Site collection of which the backup is being processed. i.e https://team.krossfarm.com
      
      
    • File Name
      Name of the file with complete path. i.e C:\backup\team-site.bak
      
      
    • Overwrite
      If the overwrite checkbox is selected or not. I.e. No
      
      
    • Recovery step
      To recover the data, use the PowerShell restore command mentioned below.
      
      Restore-SPSite
      
      
      
      
  • Once the job is completed, the current job’s area displays no operations in progress but under the previous job, we will see the status of last job (irrespective of the successful or fail).
    
    
    • Status
      This row will tell the status of the last backup job. In our case, it is Succeeded
      
      
    • Completed
      This will display the date and time of the backup job. In our case, it is 1/21/2017 10:18 PM
      
      
    • Duration
      Total duration of the backup time job will display here, i.e., (hh:mm:ss) 0:00:04
      
      
    • Recovery step
      To recover the data, use the PowerShell restore command
      
      Restore-SPSite
      
      
      

Finally, if you browse to the directory, you will see team-site.bak file. Now, you have to perform the restore operation using the "Restore-Spsite" command. Keep in mind that there is no restore method available via Central Admin, so far.

Note -

Sometimes, after the backup job is completed (succeeded or failed), the Site collection lock is not released. In that case, you have to manually unlock the site. It is best practice to check the lock status of the Site collection once the backup job is completed.