SSP Shared Scopes in Microsoft Search Server 2008

The Microsoft Search Server 2008 Search administration pages offered a central and easy administration to the search services in SharePoint.  The only thing it missed was the SSP Level Shared Scopes.  It appeared though that only the link was missing as the ASPX pages were still located on the disk.

To navigate to the SSP Shared Scopes from the Search Administration Pages navigate to /_layouts/ViewScopesssp.aspx?Mode=ssp from the SSP host.  eg. http://MyMSS2008Server-SSPWebApplication/ssp/admin/_layouts/ViewScopesSSP.aspx?Mode=ssp.

You can add this as a link to the Search Administration page (links section) to allow quick access to the SSP.

As a matter of note, the Infrastructure Update for MOSS 2007 fixes this and adds the Scopes to the left hand action menu of the updated Search Administration pages.

SharePoint Backup

Backing up SharePoint can be a daunting task.  There are so many different options. Sometimes more than one option required.  For example, MOSS native backup (STSADM -o backup) + File System backup for the 12 Hive.

So what is the best option?  This is a common question.  Microsoft has release a wonderful White paper on backup located here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262129.aspx (which Ivan Wilson; a colleague of mine reviewed).

Working in the Consulting World of IT, it is not always possible to implement a new backup solution (such as System Centre Data Protection Manager) within a customer's site.  As such, the lowest common denominator - MOSS Native Backup is always the safest option.

Utilising STSADM -O Backup is an easy way to achieve a good solid backup (and repeatable restore).  You can perform full and differential backups which can be scripted and then scheduled to run via Task Scheduler.

The other advantage of the native backup is that it will place the Search database and the Full Text Index in a consistent state before backing them up.  The command will pause any currently running crawls, perform the backup and the resume any paused crawls.  This is extremely important, especially if your MOSS solution is an Enterprise Search  Solution.  (What's the point in a Search solution that the recovery process requires a week of full crawl indexing!!!).

One thing to watch out for when using the native backup mechanism (besides some of the pointers in the document) is your database size and available disk space.

During the first part of the native backup, the command will query the SQL Server and retrieve the database file sizes for all of the databases that are being backed up.  It will then total these values and query the available disk space of the location of the backups.  If there is not enough space available, it will not continue with the backup.

Why is this a problem?  Well, if you size your databases to a maximum size (whether that is recommended is a different story), the query returns the physical database size and not the amount of space used.  Take for example, a content database sized to a maximum of 500GB but only 10MB is currently used.  In this case the backup will first check to see if there is 500GB of free space on the target backup location before it will continue regardless of the fact there is only 10MB of space available.