List restore might fail after parent site is restored from SharePoint 2010 SP1 site collection recycle bin
September 20, 2011
SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 introduced several exciting features, including the long-waited-for site recycle bin. This allows you to restore a deleted site within 30 days (default setting that can be changed) after deletion. The functionality is available to site collection administrators and can be huge relief for organizations where users tend to spend too much effort on keeping the site hierarchies “neat” and deleting everything that seems to be “not important any more”.
However, there is a gotcha you should be aware of if you rely on this functionality. The issue is already fixed in August 2011 Cumulative Update Package, but I thought I would share the info, since I could not find any KB describing it. Here you go:
Issue. A list cannot be restored from recycle bin after the parent site is deleted and restored from SharePoint SP1 site collection recycle bin.
Details. A list or document library is deleted in a SharePoint 2010 SP1 site and is available in the user recycle bin. The parent site itself is then deleted and appears in the administrator recycle bin on the site collection level. After you restore the site from site collection administrator recycle bin, the deleted list still appears in the user recycle bin, but any attempt to restore the list fails. List contents is unavailable to users.
Steps to reproduce:
- Create a new site in the site collection. For example, the name is New Product Version Team Site: http://MyPortal/sites/MyProduct/NewProductVersion
- Create a document library in the newly created site (Project Specs) and upload several documents.
- Delete the newly created document library. The library appears in the user recycle bin in the New Product Version site.
- Delete the site. The deleted site appears in the site collection recycle bin.
- Restore the site from site collection recycle bin.
- Open the restored site and go to the user recycle bin. The document library appears there as expected.
- Select the document library (Project Specs) and click Restore.
Expected result: The library should be restored from Recycle Bin.
Actual result (on SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 without August 2011 Cumulative Update Package): Restore attempt fails with error: “A list with this name “Project Specs” already exists. To restore the list, move or rename the existing list and try again.”
In addition, deleted document library (Project Specs) unexpectedly appears in the “All Site Content” after the site restore. An attempt to open the Project Specs document library from All Site Content page fails with 404 error.
Resolution: Luckily, the SharePoint team already fixed this issue, all you need is obtain and install SharePoint 2010 August 2011 Cumulative Update Package before trying to restore the deleted site. You can find information about August CU here for SharePoint Sever and for SharePoint Foundation. I only posted this issue description for reference, since there seems to be no description of the symptoms in Microsoft Support KB articles.
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
So, how much storage Recycle Bin needs after all?
September 27, 2007
Joel Oleson just posted quite interesting thoughts on Recycle Bin. In this post, he also according to MS IT stats Recycle Bin only adds 5-10% of storage overhead. This seemed really interesting to me: I would anticipate much larger number there. So, I traced the numbers back to the original MS IT statistics post from about a month ago:
Current Global SharePoint FootPrint
15.2 Terabytes Used by databases
152,236 Site Collections
2007 Recycle Bin Feature Usage
9850 Site Collections Using Recycle bin
845 GB of storage used for feature
Looks like the 5-10% estimation comes from comparing total SharePoint data to the space occupied by data in Recycle Bins. There is only one catch: Recycle Bin is only enabled for less than 10,000 site collections out of 152,000. Well, if Recycle Bin is only enabled for some 7% of total site collections, no wonder it does not take too much space! (And why Recycle Bin is disabled for the vast majority of SharePoint instances in MS IT is another interesting question…)
So, if it is not 5%, how much storage do you want to allocate for the Recycle Bin? This is actually an easy one: by default, the second stage Recycle Bin is limited to up to 50% of the site collection quota. And the first stage is within the quota, so it actually does not add any storage requirements. This means, if you just go with defaults, you simply need to allocate additional 50% on top of what you’re planning for all site collections. If that seems too much, be sure to change the second stage settings in the web application’s General Settings. Over time it will chew up as much as you let it, so it’s a good idea to limit this from day one.
Oh, and by the way… Joel, you mentioned couple Microsoft partners who offer something beyond simple recycle bin functionality. There’s actually more, and the list keeps growing! Check this out.
Technorati Tags:
sharepoint, 3rd party, recycle bin, granular recovery, restore
Why disable recycle bin in SharePoint 2007?
September 11, 2007
One of my favorite features of WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 is the Recycle Bin. It obviously helps to reduce the number of “please find me that super-important document I just deleted, I need it ASAP” calls if not get rid of them completely.
Still, Central Administration’s Global Settings page allows to disable the Recycle Bin (or only it’s second stage) for any given Web Application. My first thought when I saw that was: “No, you don’t let people throw away their safety net!” But thinking more about this, I believe there might be few possible reasons why disable Recycle Bin in SharePoint 2007:
- You are using SharePoint as the front-end for another application, which is the authoritative source of data. For example, this can be the case when EMC Documentum is used as a primary content management engine. Still, even in this case you might want to keep Recycle Bin to catch interim results of team collaborative work before they are pushed to the primary content management system.
- You are using Office SharePoint Server for Search to crawl other sources of data.
- You have built an application that is all around processes and does not have much to do with actual data. Not that I can imagine an app that would not suffer from someone occasionally deleting couple items that are being worked on, be that tasks or custom forms or documents.
- Like Joel Oleson one day you’ve just experienced the Doh! moment and realized data in Recycle Bin counts against your site quota. But unlike Joel you decided to get rid of the Recycle Bin altogether instead of reading the ‘Lesson learned’ in his post. Well, go back and re-read it!
Anyone got more examples?
But regardless of the reasons why you choose to disable the Recycle Bin, make sure you understand possible consequences of doing so. And ask yourself what are you loosing if you leave it enabled. Just in case.
Technorati Tags:
sharepoint, MOSS 2007, WSS v3.0, Recycle Bin
