How to backup SharePoint Document Library

Question

I have SharePoint 2010 And I have used it as document management system, I wandered if make backup to SharePoint database is enough to backup our documents in another word Documents is stored in SharePoint database, please advise. 

Answer 1

You're asking a good question, but the problem is that its one that can take a
great deal of time to answer in depth. I'll try to cover the broad strokes here...
Yes, backing up your SharePoint content databases will technically create a backup of the documents that you are uploading into the SharePoint sites stored in those content databases.
BUT , there's a lot more to consider than just that. The bullet points below cover some of the big ones off the top of my head:
SharePoint stores documents in its content databases using the Binary Large Object (BLOB) data type. It is not possible to directly extract a document from a SharePoint database without going through SharePoint, at least not in a manner supported by MS.
This means that you must re-attach the restored content database to a live SharePoint farm in order to get to those documents again once you've restored the database from backup.
And that means that you'll have to rebuild an entire farm and reattach that database to it, not something that can usually be done quickly.
In order to reattach that database backup to a SharePoint farm, your new farm must be patched to at least the same version as the farm where the content database originated. So you have to be careful to track the version of SharePoint you used in the farm
and rebuild to that level.
If the site collections in that content database used any custom code, site templates, web parts, etc, you must install those into your new farm, or there's a good chance your site's won't work and you won't be able to access your content.
You'll have to re-do all of the configuration settings you customized in your new farm as well, if you want it to be able to replace the functionality of your current farm. SharePoint 2010 does introduce configuration database backups, but they're not a
complete solution (they don't include ALL of the configuration data for your farm).
Changes to the configuration of your sites in IIS, files in the SharePoint root directories, Active Directory, etc, are not captured in SQL Server or SharePoint backups. You'll need to back them up yourself.
I will qualify my comments by saying that I'm talking about this stuff from an overall Disaster Recovery perspective, not from a targeted approach to protect some specific highly important documents you're putting into SharePoint. But this is all stuff you
have to consider if you're going to use SQL Server to protect those documents.
I would recommend also taking a look at SharePoint's ability to save a document library or list as a template with content included, this can allow end users to save content on their own through the SharePoint site's UI and protect it. Or, you can use the
Export-SPWeb PowerShell CMDLET (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee428301.aspx ) to script out the protection of that document library as well.
Does that all make sense?
John
MCTS: WSS v3, MOSS 2007, and SCOM 2007
MCITP: Enterprise Project Management with Project Server 2007
Now Available on Amazon - The SharePoint 2010 Disaster Recovery Guide. Also available -
The SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide.
My blog: My Central Admin.