When deploying SharePoint as a business-critical collaboration platform and digital-asset repository, implementing a comprehensive backup and recovery strategy is absolutely essential. Though SharePoint and SQL Server natively provide some data protection capabilities, these prove inadequate for most competitive organizations. In this session we will discuss the key components of any successful SharePoint backup and recovery plan. After analyzing SharePoint's native data and platform protection capabilities, we will identify best practices, available free tools, and other best-of-breed solutions for ensuring a fully protected SharePoint platform.  Finally, we will discuss SharePoint archiving, and review how intelligent archiving procedures, when coupled with a successful data protection plan, can improve platform performance and reliability, and lower storage and management costs.