Thursday, 12 April 2007

Backing Up Groove Spaces

Microsoft have recently published a very useful guide to your options for backing up your Groove spaces. You can find it here. It focusses on your options for backing up entire spaces which is useful for a security measure, but somewhat limited - you cannot do anything with a Groove space archive other than restore it.

A nice thing about the article is that it mentions some third-party offerings that make Groove backups easier - including Bambuco. The article doesn't really explain the advantages or disadvantages of the different approaches. With Bambuco you can do the same as the other suggestions - backup a space, but you can also do something much more useful, which is select what parts of the space are backed up. As an example of the latter approach, I've posted a script in the Bambuco Developer Center which lets you copy files out of a Groove Files tool based on the file extension.

There are a bunch of good reasons for wanting to do this:

  • Quick restore of files accidentally deleted within Groove
  • Your files etc. are available for further processing such as searching,
    storage in corporate repositories or conversion to other formats.
  • You can run Bambuco scripts as a part of a larger scheduled job.
  • You could even copy selected files or other content from one space into another.