Backup SharePoint 2013

After building 4 farms, I deployed powershell to backup each farm (full farm backup), I quickly ran out of disk space for backups (250GB) as the backup-spfarm command-let will not overwrite a pre-existing farm backup (spbr0000 directory), therefore, I only had enough disk to retain one backup of each environment.

Enter SharePoint Backup Augmentation Cmdlets from CodePlex (http://sharepointbac.codeplex.com).

SharePointBAC makes it possible to groom backup sets, archive backups, and more. While the version on codeplex supports 2010, I was able to obtain the 2013 source files from Trevor Seward, MVP.

Once the solution is added and deployed, the following 5 new command-lets become available:

1. Get-SPBackupCatalog: Retrieves an SPBackupCatalog object for a selected backup location and exposes properties of the catalog
2. Export-SPBackupCatalog: Generates an export/archive of one or backup sets that is compressed as a zip file by default
3. Remove-SPBackupCatalog: Performs grooming (i.e., cleaning out old backups) on a backup catalog and its associated backup sets
4. Send-SPBackupStatus: E-mails a summary of the last backup operation to selected recipients using the farm's outbound e-mail configuration
5. Set-SPBackupCatalog: Updates properties on an SPBackupCatalog object (more specifically, its underlying spbrtoc.xml catalog file)

Here is a sample .ps1 script utilizing SharePointBAC solution which will backup farm and retain only the most recent backup:

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell
$cat = Get-SPBackupCatalog \\server\Share
Backup-SPFarm -Directory \\server\Share -BackupMethod Full
$cat.Refresh()
$cat | Remove-SPBackupCatalog -RetainCount 1 -Confirm:$false
$cat.Refresh()
$cat | Send-SPBackupStatus -Recipients "admin@domain.com"