Q: Where are SharePoint documents
stored on the server?
What are the options for backing up and
restoring SharePoint documents?
A: All SharePoint content is stored in a Microsoft
SQL Server database.
There are several
options for backup and restore that enable
SharePoint to support document storage
more effectively than traditional file shares.
Recycle Bin. Users have access to items
(to which they have permissions) in the
Recycle Bin for the site. If they delete something,
they can restore it right away. You
configure Recycle Bin settings for the site’s
Web application through Central Administration,
where you specify the Recycle Bin’s
size and how long an item will remain in the
site Recycle Bin before being removed.
Second-stage Recycle Bin. Windows
SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office
SharePoint Server 2007 have a second-stage
Recycle Bin at the site-collection level. When
an item is removed from a site’s Recycle Bin
based on the time configuration mentioned
previously, the item is placed in the secondstage
Recycle Bin. An administrator can
recover items from there by navigating to the
Site Settings for the top-level site in the site
collection and clicking the Recycle Bin link.
The size of this Recycle Bin is configured,
also in the Web application settings, as a
percentage of the size of a site’s Recycle Bin.
If the second-stage Recycle Bin fills, the items
placed in the Recycle Bin first are removed to
make room for new items.
Versioning. SharePoint Server 2007 lets
you view the version history of an item or file.
This is useful when users damage files without
actually deleting them, such as erasing a
file’s contents or overwriting a good file with
a bad file of the same name. If your document
library has versioning enabled, you can simply
go to the document’s Version History and
recover the “good” version.
Content database. Each Windows Share-
Point Services site collection is stored in a
content database, which is the actual SQL
Server database. The content database can be
recovered in the event of corruption by using
transaction logs, or it can be restored using
either SQL Server recovery methods or the
restore functionality within SharePoint Central
Administration. Of course, that assumes
you have a good backup plan for your Share-
Point databases, which is paramount.
Third-party add-ons. Third-party ISVs
offer item-level recovery solutions, which
enable SharePoint administrators to restore
granular items from backup. Tools include
Quest Software’s Recovery Manager for Share-
Point, AvePoint’s DocAve, and IBM’s Tivoli
Storage Manager for Microsoft SharePoint.
Q: When I travel to another time zone and
look at Calendar in Microsoft Outlook Web
Access (OWA) in Exchange Server 2003,
it shifts all my appointments to match the
time zone I traveled to. How can I see my
appointments in my “home” time zone?
A: Good question! In OWA, in Options,
there’s a time zone setting, Current Time
Zone, which Figure 1 shows. Changing it,
though, doesn’t change the time in which
appointments are displayed. In fact, I can’t
see what this setting does change. Instead, as
you experienced, OWA uses the time zone on
the client (the Windows time zone) to display
calendar items.
However, if you use the basic OWA client
(instead of logging on to the premium client)
this setting does work. OWA 2007 in Exchange
Server 2007 seems to have solved the problem,
and your calendar entries should reflect
the time zone option that you configured.
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