Central Administration Backup

Throughout my practical experiences I have alwayz observed that backup and restore from Central Admin fails 9 times out of 10, however if we observe SharePoint backup and restore is the most powerful procedure incase you have landed into such situation that you have absolutely nothing left in your sharepoint site when you have to recover from an absolute disaster.

What is the difference between the Central admin back up and the SQL back up ?

That’s a great question to answer, although the SQL backup and restore procedure is fast and simple, it works on the database part and just attaching those databases gets the site back to normal conditions but the Central administration backup also known as the Catastrophic backup and restore method gives you an option to backup your entire farm which includes the Configuration databases, SSP databases search databases and also the content databases, that means if you take a Catastrophic backup and save it to a secure place you can get the entire site back within less time and even you will not need to index new documents to make search work, isn’t that perfect !!

But you will have to take care once you take a full catastrophic backup, keep taking incremental backups and number them properly then while restoring you will have to restore the full backup first and the incremental backups one by one.

My advice to you is whenever you take a catastrophic backup make sure you test it before you relay totally on it, there is a command line mode that will also help you take the same type of results.

Here is a little advice from Mr. Tech net on how do you do it Backup and Restore
Now there is a great explanation of the attributes given here. Which can be used while you execute the command