How to: Use a Requestor to Back Up and Restore Data

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This topic describes the steps you need to perform to back up and restore Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 data using your Requestor.

To back up and restore data by using your Requestor

  1. After installing Office SharePoint Server 2007, manually start the Windows SharePoint Services VSS Writer service by clicking Start, pointing to Administrative Tools, and then clicking Services and start the service called Volume Shadow Copy.

  2. Register the Writer in the Windows registry by calling the STSADM -o registerwsswriter command from the <%Program Files %>\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Bin\ directory.

  3. Use your Requestor to back up and restore data. You can either use your requestor (as outlined in the Volume Shadow Copy Service Overview) or the BETest test utility (available in the VSS SDK) to back up or restore from Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Security for Running VSS

VSS has special requirements for the accounts running the writers on all targeted server instances for backup and restore

  • The running account must have permission to call into VSS. By default, VSS requires the writer to be a member of the Administrator or Backup Operators group on the targeted server instance. You can configure a registry key to allow other accounts to have access to VSS.

  • The account must have permission to issue BACKUP DATABASE and RESTORE DATABASE commands against the database servers.

  • The account must have permission to open up VDI against SQL Server, which requires the client to be a member of the SQL Server sysadmin group.

  • The account must be able to perform queries against the sys.master_files catalog view in the master database on the SQL server.

Also, to be hosted by the Timer service (owstimer.exe), the writer service must run under the admin app pool account, which is the "Network Service" account in a basic installation of SharePoint.

Note   It is very unlikely that this account will be a local machine admin account, which differs from the requirement for VSS where the processing account must be running as local system.