 you. I need to restore a SharePoint 2013 farm, but I don't know where and how to start. I have two front-end servers, two application servers and one SQL 2012 Enterprise Edition server. I have the backup of the two FE and app servers. I have reinstalled the SQL servers and attached databases from backup, but I'm missing something and for that I need your help. What is the best practice for my case? Give it to him, Sharers. Start from scratch. This is definitely higher a professional, because the problem is there's so many different things that could go wrong. I mean, Sean and I have done this, right? We've kind of teamed up on something similar. The problem is that, you know, for a SharePoint farm, it's so complex and there's so many different parts and pieces. If you're building something from new, it's one thing. But if you're kind of bringing something in that you've already got, there's so many configuration points and there's so many database points or so many specifics that to answer this question, obviously, you know, you would really need to talk to somebody. I mean, if I was giving free advice for something super easy that I would try first, I would run the config wizard about 87 times and I would reboot things a few times and see if maybe that solves your problem. However, it probably won't. So the fact that you're asking now, you know, trying to figure out what your what your missing thing is, the problem there is you probably didn't capture it in the first place or at least in an approved way. So when it comes to a SharePoint farm restoring from backup, there are really only two approaches you can use. Either use the built-in backup tool to back up your entire farm. That'll capture it in a consistent state with everything at a point in time capture, or you use a third party tool that's approved for that task that uses the VSS writer to tap into it. But having said that, where what I said in kind of our internal discussion on this is focus on where your data is 90%, 95% of the data you're going to want to get back out is in those content databases. And the great thing about content databases is as long as you bring them in and attach them into a farm, roughly the same version and patch level, you can then access that content. Now that's not going to get you your managed metadata term store back. You're going to be looking for different piecemeal solutions to different items you might want to get back. But that'll get you most of the way there. And the truth is very few people really ever restore and rebuild the farm exactly the way it used to be. 90% of the time you start with a new farm with the current patch level and you bring in things like the content databases. There's very little, unless you're in an outline kind of edge case where let's say that you've got a corpus of data that takes two weeks to fully crawl and you rely heavily on search. Typically you're not going to want to bring search back anyway because it is very finicky about index versioning and what's in the databases. So that's one of those things where you just throw it out and re-index your content and that's 90% of the way fine for most people. So I would say focus on your data and work on that. But ultimately we'll go back to what Sharon said, hire a professional best idea. Yeah, there's a lot of it just so this is my you know put my researcher hat on this kind of unofficial questions that I ask people. In fact I've talked to Sharon about this. I talked to Sean a little bit about this. Previously like how much work are you doing on like this kind of work this kind of historically core SharePoint backup recovery migration related stuff that work. So many experts, so many firms that are out there consultants that have been doing this for a long time that have been doing this kind of work for a long time. There are a lot of experts out there. If it's an option for you the funding to go and get that help if you can bring somebody in versus try to painfully go through it yourself. I'll end where Sharon began is bringing the experts that know how to do this. I think a lot of people and I'm just going to say this on behalf of people everywhere. I think people feel like they have to hire somebody to do the whole job and while that you know is kind of the quickest to most painless. I think that a lot of people don't realize that if they put in the effort you know kind of they're doing the sweat equity work and doing doing the work that sometimes just having an expert that you can call like once a week and be like here's my open ended questions or can I send you an email or whatever. Sometimes that's enough too because like to Sean's point I mean I would too I'm building a brand new one in migrating the stuff in is a way better choice and way safer but I mean you could walk through those with somebody and not have to have them do the work too. So just remember hiring a professional doesn't always have to mean that you are having them do all of it sometimes they're just there to assist you in the work that you are doing. Yeah and Sharon and I have used that model before with one of her clients and I think it was pretty effective. We got them over the hump and it wasn't hundreds of hours invested it was really on a consultative basis so. Well everything's a trade-off of time or money you can spend your wheels for hours at a time or pay for somebody just do it for you know sometimes it's worth it. I know I hire a professional and I need to thank goodness. We've all just spun our wheels on those kinds of projects really like you know I should have just called somebody. I feel like that's a maturity thing like you get to a point in life that you're just like I don't even want to try to figure this out just finding an expert that can do it for me and I'm happy. Yeah it's like paying the neighborhood kid to mow your lawn like I am fully capable of doing that. I have no desire to do that it's worth the 20 bucks. Right my time is worth more than 20 bucks. If you can get your yard vote for 20 bucks that's pretty awesome Christian. Well yeah that lasts probably so long and then they get a little bit smaller. Then they graduate go to college you gotta find another one. I want to hear you murder this thing. Everybody now listen. You like my my suggestion like I just I read that whole thing and I was like I have been I'm the professional that's gotten hired on this question multiple times because people try to go down the path of asking for help and it ends up being higher professional. Yeah right.