When SharePoint 2010 early sneak preview was first published by the product team, one of the big wow’s were the new granular content restore capabilities, available right there in Central Administration. While this is certainly an improvement compared to earlier version of SharePoint, I still cannot call this functionality “granular content restore”. Let’s walk through the steps required to restore a document from database backup with these new capabilities.
How to Restore from Unattached Content Database, Step by Step
1. Find the backup file that contains that document you need. You’ll need to know document original location so that you can match that to the content database. You will also need to find out when the document was corrupted or deleted, so that you grab the backup file from the right date. When you have all this information you can find the reuqired backup file (or probably request it from your SQL DBA or Backup operators).
2. Restore content database to a temporary location. Backup file is not enough, to use the unattached content database recovery you need the database mounted on a SQL server. This can be the same SQL instance used by SharePoint, or a different SQL box. If you restore into the same SQL instance make sure you (or your SQL DBA’s) use a different name for the restored database and don’t override the production content! Note the name of the SQL Server instance and the name of the database copy.
3. Go to SharePoint Central Administration, navigate to Backup and Restore and click the “Recover data from an unattached content database” link under Granular Backup.
4. Type the SQL Instance and temporary database names and specify what you want to do. Note that none of the available options actually allows you to restore a document, you can either create a backup of site collection or export a site or list. If you only need a single document, you’ll need to export the library in order to get it.
5. Select site collection, site and list to export. In this step you also specify the name for the export file and the export options, such as whether security and versions should be included in the export. You are ready to start the export.
Congratulations, you have completed the Unattached Content Database Recovery now! Wait, did you actually need that document? All you have is the export.cmp file, where to look next? There is no import available in the Central Administration UI. So what do you do next?
6. Start the SharePoint Management Shell, which is PowerShell with Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell snap-in already loaded. Then use the Import-SPWeb cmdlet to import the library. It is important to understand you cannot restore list or library under a different name. If a document library with the same name already exists in the destination site, import will merge contents and by default create new document versions where possible.
7. Finally, browse to the imported library and get the document you just restored. Once this is done, you can safely delete the imported document library from SharePoint, and delete the temporary database from SQL server.
Pros and Contras of Unattached Content Database Recovery
If you ever had to perform granular content restore via a recovery farm in SharePoint 2003 or SharePoint 2007, you can see the process is not very different with 2010. The big step forward is that there is no need to maintain the recovery farm for SharePoint 2010 and you don’t have to attach the temporary database to the farm. You also have the UI to do the export via Central Administration.
However, that’s where improvements end and all the limitations remain:
- You have to know exactly which backup contains the requested data, there is no search available. If you make a mistake, it is not until the very last step in the process that you find out the document you looked for is missing after the import and you have to start it all over.
- You must use higlhy privileged account to perfrom all operations in both SQL and SharePoint, which might not be possible in some environments. Sometimes in a large organization it would take 3 different people to perform the task.
- There is no single UI to perform the operation from the first to the last step. You have to use SQL backup management tools, SharePoint Central Administration and PowerShell, which obviously increases time to restore.
- Granularity is limitied. You can restore a site collection, a site or a list/library.
- Finally, all inherited limitations of SharePoint export and import apply when restoring sites and lists from unattached content database.
Cannot find document in SharePoint Recycle Bin?
March 19, 2010
Ever searched for a document or list item in SharePoint 2007 Recycle Bin with no luck? You know the document was deleted from the SharePoint site, so why does it not show up here? Here’re possible reasons for that:
- Are you looking at the correct site? Recycle Bin in SharePoint is site-specific, a document deleted from http://myportal/sites/projects/manhattan will not appear in the top level site’s (http://myportal/sites/projects) Recycle Bin.
- Were it you who deleted the document? Recycle Bin is not only site-specific, it is also specific for each user. Thus the Recycle Bin contents you see is limited to documents, items, lists and libraries that you’ve deleted, content deleted by other users does not show up here.
- How long ago was it deleted? Recycle Bin does not keep deleted items for ever. The default setting in SharePoint is to keep content in Recycle Bin for 30 days after deletion, this can be changed by the SharePoint farm administrators. When this grace period is over, items are moved to the second stage aka Site Collection Recycle Bin.
If any of the above seems to be the likely reason, the Site Collection Recycle Bin can help. To access this, you should have the site collection administrator privileges. Site Collection Recycle Bin shows all the deleted content from all sub-sites within this site collection, regardless of who deleted this data. By default it keeps the data for the same period after it was moved from the first stage Recycle Bin, or until it reaches certain percentage of the site collection’s quota.
Still there can be situations when a deleted item/document does not appear in both site and site collection Recycle Bins. The most common is when a folder or entire list or library is deleted. Recycle Bin only shows the object that has been deleted, with no ability to expand or search its contents. When looking for a document make sure you consider that possibly its parent folder or library can be showing up in the Recycle Bin instead.
Finally, there are site deletes, which are not captured by the Recycle Bin. If this is a common situation in your SharePoint, you might want to extend your deployment with the MSIT Site Delete Capture tool (available at http://governance.codeplex.com/releases/view/3830), or looks for 3rd party granular recovery tools.
Same applies to SharePoint 2007 as well as 2010, there are no changes in how you work with the Recycle Bin in SharePoint 2010.
Some useful links and resources for planning and using the Recycle Bin in SharePoint:
- For business users: View, restore, or delete items in the Recycle Bin article on SharePoint help and how-to site (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/HA100214341033.aspx)
- For IT admins: Plan for capturing and storing deleted objects on TechNet (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262975.aspx)
- For PowerShell geeks: Restoring from SharePoint 2010 Recycle Bin through PowerShell (http://maplpro.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-to-restore-from-sharepoint-2010.html)
Technorati Tags:
SharePoint, recycle bin, SharePoint 2010
Just saw this link on Mauro Cordelli’s blog: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/default.aspx
Make sure to check this out! The site includes short video overviews of what’s new for the users, for IT pros and for developers; preliminary system requirements and advice on how to get ready; and preliminary availability dates:
Beta in 2009, general availability targeted at the first half of 2010.
Speaking about how to get ready, make sure to read Joel’s recent post on the stsadm.exe -o preupgradecheck. This command is available in stsadm.exe as of Service Pack 2 for WSS v3 and MOSS 2007, and is the first planning step on your path to the future upgrade.
If you’re interested in getting more info about SharePoint 2010, sign up for the SharePoint conference in October. Detailed agenda is not yet published for the event, but looks like there will be a healthy mix of sessions on getting most from the current versions as well as learning about the futures. See you there!
UPDATE (7/28): I also posted some thoughts around backup and recovery in SharePoint 2010 and specifically the new unattached content database feature on the SharePoint For All site.
Technorati Tags:
sharepoint, sharepoint 2010, sharepoint conference
Update on “Cannot find… exportsettings.xml” error when restoring site with SharePoint Designer. Go get SP2.
May 13, 2009
Remember the “Cannot find… exportsettings.xml” error when trying to restore a site with SharePoint Designer? The reason for the error was the default 25MB file size limitation for the CMP files used to store the backup.
If you tried to use SharePoint Designer for site backup and ran into this error, you just have another reason to upgrade your SharePoint farm to Service Pack 2. Why? Here’s what the TechNet article on SharePoint Designer site backup says:
If you have not installed Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with Service Pack 2 (SP2), backups that are performed by using Office SharePoint Designer are limited to 25 megabytes (MB). After you install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with SP2, the limit is increased to 2 gigabytes (GB).
For sites larger than 2GB the same workaround still applies, you can get the rest of your backup from the Site Collection Recycle Bin and manually reconcile it.
Thanks to Alex Kirillov who brought my attention to this change in WSS v3 SP2.
Technorati Tags:
sharepoint, backup, SharePoint Designer
Book Giveaway: SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide
April 7, 2009
As promised last week, we’re giving away three copies of SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide, a book by John Ferringer and Sean McDonough.
If you’re following my blog, you already know about the new SharePoint community we (Quest Software) have launched at www.SharePointForAll.com. So I want to try and use this opportunity to bring more good people to the community.
To win your free copy of the book, you need to:
- Join the SharePoint For All community if you’re not a registered member yet. It’s very simple, but gives you access to the forums and downloads on the site. Downloads include pre-release Beta versions of Quest management and migration tools for SharePoint, as well as freeware tools such as SharePoint Disaster Recovery Advisor.
- Publish a link to SharePoint for all site on your SharePoint-related blog or on a publicly available SharePoint-related forum. It can be a link to the site’s home page, or any of the downloads, or any blog post on the Quest team blog, whatever is more relevant to the topic of your post.
- Finally, send an email with the two links to a special email address: get-a-book@sharepoint-recovery.com. Your email should include links to your profile at SharePointForAll.com community site and to your blog/forum post, and your name/contact info.
The first three winners will get the free copy of SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide. You can see my review of the book here, and read more about it on Amazon.com.
One more note, you cannot win the book if you work for Quest. Sorry, guys – I can lend you my copy if you want to read it :-)
Once again, many thanks to the publisher, Cengage Learning, for giving me this opportunity.
Technorati Tags:
book review, community, disaster recovery, Quest, SharePoint
You must have seen it on a number of blogs already, starting with Mark Rackley’s “SharePoint Designer – a definite maybe” post last Sunday: SharePoint Designer is now free for anyone to download and use. See official details from Microsoft and the download link in a Letter to SharePoint Designer customers.
Well… Enough said by Marc and in Joel’s response: I highly recommend reading both posts. Although they seem to disagree on some details, bottom line of both posts is the same: SharePoint Designer is a powerful and very handy tool if you know what you’re doing. Otherwise it can be disastrous. So… if you don’t lock down SPD use in your farms, make sure you have a good backup before your users start playing with it!
Technorati Tags:
MOSS 2007, sharepoint, sharepoint administration, sharepoint designer
Book Review: SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide
April 1, 2009
Nice people from Cengage Learning contacted me recently for a review of a book they published. The book is called SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide and was written by John L. Ferringer and Sean McDonough.
They were also very kind to send me three copies of the book for giveaway, but since you won’t believe it on April 1st anyway ;-) there’ll be a separate post soon explaining how to win your copy.
Who should read this book?
This book will be invaluable for SharePoint administrators who already have a good understanding of how data is stored in SharePoint and have some technical experience with built-in backup and recovery tools. I think it would be a difficult read for those who only have end user experience with SharePoint and are new to the platform administration. It will be overwhelming and confusing for such readers.
Why read this book?
I think that anyone who already has such experience and is tasked with preparing an overall disaster recovery plan should read this. Here’s the good stuff you will find in the book:
- Helpful tips on what you can do with the native backup and recovery tools and how you could extend them via scripting and custom development can be found troughout the book, specifically in chapters 6-7.
- If you are SharePoint administrator with not much experience in technologies it depends on, such as IIS and SQL Server, you’ll find quite a few insights here and get a bigger picture of what tools exist and can be used in SharePoint disaster recovery. Chapters 8 through 11 cover SQL server and Windows backup and recovery and high availability.
- Real jewels in chapters 12 through 14 (DR Planning and Key Concepts; Design and Implementation; Testing and Maintenance) are a must-read for any technical staff responsible for SharePoint recovery. Too often we think of SharePoint just from technical perspective, these chapters help to put the technology in the right place from perspective of the overall business continuity planning.
Some suggestions for the Second Edition
Few things that I believe could be done better to make the book more straightforward for SharePoint newbies, not only administrators with good level of understanding:
- Add an overview of how SharePoint data, configurations, and customizations are stored. A lot of this information is scattered throughout the book, but there’s no single chapter in the book to serve as a reference. Things like Joel’s SharePoint containment hierarchy could really help here.
- Make it very clear how much technical knowledge and experience is assumed. Some sections of the book surprised me by too detailed explanations of the basics (like the default install paths with screenshots, etc.), while the very next page can mention about IP bindingsin IIS with no explanation at all.
- Re-write or cut the chapters that cover topics that are not directly related to disaster recovery. It’s good to know about recycle bins, SharePoint Designer backups, and maybe even the options such as saving site templates with content. But none of these really fits into the disaster recovery plan discussed further on in the book, and spending almost 60 pages on them might be too much.
- Get another round of technical review to ensure all technical details are accurate and there is no ambiguity. For example, in several places the book mentions you can restore a single site collection from a Central Administration backup. In reality, this is only true when you keep one site collection per content database. This assumption is never articulated in the book, which can be really misleading for readers who don’t have hands-on experience with Central Administration and STSADM.exe backups.
Bottom line:
SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide is a great resource for SharePoint administrators with good technical understanding of SharePoint overall architecture and built-in backup and recovery tools. From reading it you can learn how you can extend the use of the native tools with other methods, and see what other technologies such as Windows Server and SQL Server have to offer. Finally, the book allows you to take a step back and see the bigger picture of SharePoint disaster recovery from the business perspective.
So, take your time to review the ToC with John’s comments and stay tuned for the giveaway details!
Technorati tags:
book review; disaster recovery; sharepoint; sql; stsadm.exe
When you start planning for disaster recovery of your SharePoint farm you inevitably face the challenge of how to restore the farm configuration.
What is a configuration database? A configuration database in SharePoint is what defines your farm. It keeps all the information about other databases, servers and services that comprise the farm. It also stores info about “all Internet Information Services (IIS) Web sites or Web applications, solutions, Web Part packages, site templates, and Web application and farm settings specific to SharePoint technologies, such as default quota, blocked file types, and configuration” (from Database types and descriptions). If you want to drill into this in more detail, take a look at the database structure explained in Nidhi’s blog.
The coolest thing about configuration database in my opinion is how it serves as a central piece in WSS 3.0 architecture to allow administrators easily scale a SharePoint farm. All the global farm settings, most of IIS configuration (some details in Joel’s post here), and even solution binaries are stored in the config database and will be automatically propagated from there when you join more servers to the farm.
What’s the problem with backup/recovery of configuration database? Restoration of SharePoint configuration database is not supported by Microsoft if all you do is just take farm backup via Central Administration or with STSADM. In case of disaster recovery, you would have to manually re-create all farm settings, re-deploy any solutions and customizations, etc. A related article on TechNet gives a little insight on what causes this support limitation:
Although the configuration database and the SharePoint Central Administration Web site content database can be backed up, restoring backups of the configuration database and Central Administration content database from a farm by using the tools built in to SharePoint Products and Technologies is not supported.
This is because data in these databases may not be synchronized with data in other Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 databases. Therefore, the tools built in to SharePoint Products and Technologies do not recover these databases during a farm-level recovery.
If this data is not synchronized, users might experience various random errors.
So, is there any way I can back up and restore the config database? We were discussing this with a well-known SQL expert Charley Hanania a while ago, and came to a simple thought – if something can be backed up, it must be possible to restore it. It’s the question of understanding the risks and choosing the right tools to mitigate them. If the risk is that SharePoint farm structure information in config database would be not synchronized with other databases, you need a way to make a point-in-time backup of all databases within the farm, ensuring that none of these databases changes during the backup process. How is this possible?
- Obviously, snapshot technologies and products that use them can achieve this functionality. For example, this allows Microsoft Data Protection Manager to back up and restore all SharePoint databases, including configuration db.
- Another supported way to restore all databases suggested on TechNet is to take a backup when the SharePoint farm is offline. Essentially, this means all SharePoint services are stopped across all front end and application servers, and no changes are being made during the backup process. Does not seem feasible for live SharePoint environment? This is where SQL Server’s features such as log shipping or database mirroring can help. Both techniques allow you to create and maintain a copy of SQL database that is not accessed by SharePoint. So working closely with your SQL DBA you can have a “point-in-time” copy of all the farm databases and back them up.
Config db is not the only reason why you can utilize log shipping and/or database mirroring in SharePoint environment. For example, see Mike Watson’s recent presentation decks from Best Practices and SPTech conferences, where he discusses how both options apply to SharePoint environment for high availability and disaster recovery.
Technorati tags:
Data Protection Manager; DPM; disaster recovery; SharePoint; SQL
SharePoint for all – new community site
February 25, 2009
Joel just anounced the new community site we’re starting here at Quest, SharePoint For All. We will try to use this site to share expertise, Quest product news, ideas, beta versions of new releases and even some research projects! Here you can also get first-hand answers from the product teams – our developers, product managers, consultants, – and of course your peers who may already be using the products.
All this is just getting started, and you can help us define what exactly SharePoint For All will become in the future. I encourage you to register and join the community now and get active on the forums.
The new community site also features the new Quest SharePoint Team blog. One of the recent posts there explains how Quest Recovery Manager for SharePoint fits into various different environments and allows to leverage existing backup infrastructure for granular data recovery. This is a follow up for Joel Oleson’s recent SharePoint backup and recovery webcast (see the recorded webcast here, and Q&A in a separate blog post).
So – watch the new team blog for the product news, and I will try to keep this blog for more generic SharePoint backup and recovery topics.
Free SharePoint Admin Book, Free SharePoint Admin Tools
November 13, 2008
In case you did not see Todd Klindt’s post about this, he’ll be giving away free copies of the new Inside SharePoint Administration book he wrote together with Shane Young and Steve Caravajal. All you need is subscribe to Todd’s blog and be among the first five to congratulate him on the book availability (see details in Todd’s original post). I’d also recommend you subscribe to Shane’s and Steve’s blogs. Just in case.
Good news for those who are not that lucky is that even purchasing the book you’ll get something for free. Every copy of Inside SharePoint Administration includes a CD with additional material and free evaluation copy of Quest Site Administrator – a great tool for centralized SharePoint administration and reporting. (Usual disclosure: this is one of the products I work on as a member of Quest SharePoint product group.)
BTW, Inside SharePoint Administration is available for pre-order on Amazon if you don’t want to take chances and rather would leverage Amazon’s guaranteed pre-order discount.
[Update, 11/19: The book is available on Amazon now, and Todd's book giveaway is complete. Congrats to the winners, and free evaluation copies of the SharePoint admin tools to the rest of us who purchase the book.]
Technorati Tags:
sharepoint, Quest, sharepoint administration
