what is covered inside the Backup-SPFarm?

Question

I am working on sharepoint enterprise server 2013. and at 5 am each day i have a scheduled task to do a full farm backup , using the following command :-

Backup-SPFarm -Directory  \\FileServer\Back -BackupMethod full -BackupThreads 10 -Force

now the generated farm backup folder will contain the following components :-

i have the following questions, about thr Farm backup i am doing:-

1. currently i have one web application with one content database. and if i do a backup for the content database directly from the sql management studio , i will get a DB backup file with the same size as the .bak file inside the FarmBackup folder (named 000000CA.bak in my case). so is this .bak file inside the farm backup folder , the same as the content database backup i will get if i do a database backup directly from the sql management studio ?

2. inside the farm backup folder, i have many .bak with 1 kb size.. so what do these represent ?

3. how i can view what does each .bak file represent?. from my understanding that the 000000CA.bak is the content database backup, i observe this from the file size.. but how i can know what do the other files represents ?

4. can i restore the generated content database backup file named 000000Ca.bak , using sql management studio, or i need to use Restore-SPFarm command ?

Thanks

Answer 1

The smaller exported files are primarily configuration objects (e.g. the Web Application itself) from the Configuration database. Some of them also represent Search objects exported from Search. You can look at the spbackup.log file for what each file represents.

Yes! You can restore the generated database backup files with SSMS. They are simple full database backups.