SharePoint: When would you take a snapshot of the Search and Index servers, when would you not?

[peluso]

Hi - I received a question recently about this topic and thought the experts could address.  Would love to hear from other community members if there is anything to the quesion or if there are other aspects to address.

Terri

[parkerj]

So why take a snapshot of your SharePoint Search and Index server, especially if these can be easily recrawled in order to put them back.  The reason that I see is to help ensure the performance of your
SharePoint environment.  There are a couple of caveats with this last statement.  If your SharePoint environment is changing rapidly then you will have to be concerned about size of your snapshots.  If you have higher SLA requirements that create the need to have fast recovery and steady performance then snapshots are going to be very important to maintain that.  Once the snapshot is restored you must recrawl your environment to ensure that you update the Search and Index databases to cover any new items that might be missed but that ensures that the main portions of your content are searchable and readily indexed.  Additionally if you are using SnapMirror to move your SharePoint system over to a DR site you may not want to replicate that data from one site to another when after you make the migration to the DR site you can crawl the environment.  This will allow you to only move over the content thus reducing the required bandwidth between sites.  Here again it comes down to what are the SLA's that have to be met and how can I best ensure that I can meet those SLA's.