After SharePoint Server 2007 has been successfully deployed, you’ll find that the ongoing maintenance is essential to a successful, ongoing operation. Based on what we find in the plan, we have two best practice recommendations.

First, perform a regular restore of your farm to offline servers. You need to do this at least twice each year for several reasons. For one thing, it affirms that your backup hardware and software are working as expected. If, for some reason, the backup solution is reporting successful backups but is not actually backing up as expected, a trial restore will reveal this problem. In addition, performing regular restores of your farm to offline servers keeps your restore skills up to date. It is not an understatement to say that learning how to do a restore for your SharePoint Server 2007 farm at the time when you need to do it in production is not a good idea. Just like an athlete practices his skills to be able to play in the championship game, so administrators need to practice restores in order to know what to do when a real disaster strikes.

Second, as mentioned previously, you need to monitor your servers on a regular basis for the same counters to build a baseline of performance numbers on how your servers are operating.