Sharepoint 2003 Backup and Restore Utilities

Tool	Purpose
Stsadm.exe	Makes a full-fidelity backup of site collections.
SharePoint Migration tool (Smigrate.exe)	Backs up and restores sites and subsites. Does not make a full-fidelity backup; you might lose some customizations or settings during the process.
SharePoint Portal Server Data Backup and Restore utility (Spsbackup.exe)	Backs up and restores all databases, except the configuration database. Restores content indexes and content sources.
SPBackup.exe	Determines which site collections have changed and generates a batch file that backs up changed site collections using the Stsadm.exe tool.

Sharepoint 2003 Database Recovery models

Database	Default install	Changed
Database ending with _Config_db	FULL	FULL
Database ending with _SITE	FULL	FULL
Database ending with _PROF	SIMPLE	FULL
Database ending with _SERV	SIMPLE	FULL

Full Recovery Mode is enabled because it is created by Windows SharePoint Services (_SITES and Config DB database). The other databases (_PROF and _SERV) are created by SharePoint Portal Server.

Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003

The following table lists the default databases

Database	Description
Database ending with _Config_db	it stores the entire configuration database for the SharePoint server/farm. Anything pertaining to global configuration and which is set through the SharePoint central administration is stored in this database.
Database ending with _SITE	it stores all the content of a specific portal. It contains the files, web pages, webs, sites, and all inter-related SharePoint infrastructure.
Database ending with _PROF	it stores entire information about User Profiles; it also stores details of what data to gather about various User Profiles.
Database ending with _SERV	It stores data regarding search, notification, and indexing. It stores the gatherer log information as well as the text indexes for the content that is crawled. In fact, it can be easily checked up by right-clicking on any of the database and choosing Properties. In fact, that could be a way to know how much space each function/activity of your portal is taking up