Monday, 25 July 2011

Granular Restore of SharePoint Content

There are occasions when the site and site collection recycle bins are insufficient for recovering deleted content.
Examples
· When a site itself is deleted it does not go into a recycle bin.


· When the various thresholds for the recycle bins have been exceeded.


Restore Process
Restore is performed as three steps:
· Restore of a content database
· Inside SharePoint Central Administration, Unattached Content Database Recovery
· Powershell on SharePoint Application Server


Restore of a content database
Ask Infrastructure team to restore a copy of the intranet content database to database server with a different name. It is important to have a different name otherwise the production content database will be overwritten.


Unattached Content Database Recovery
Open the Central Administration site


Navigate to Back and Restore \ Recover Data from an Unattached Content Database



Enter the Database Server and Database Name of the restored database.


In the Operation to Perform I used Export Site or List but could also use Browse Content.
Click Next
Select the Site Collection, Site and optionally List to restore. Click Next
In the File Location enter something relative to application server e.g. \\melap01\f$\export.cmp



Click Start Export.
Wait for it to finish, use the Refresh button to check status.


Create a Temporary Site to receive the restored content
Too high risk to restore directly into the production site so create a new temporary restore site somewhere, ideal candidate would be beneath the site where the content is missing from.
Open SharePoint 2010 Management Shell (PowerShell) prompt on application server.
Type: Import-SPWeb
When prompted for the identity, enter the URL for the new restore site.
When prompted for the path, enter the path for the backup file that you created in previous step, e.g. \\MELAP01\F$\export.cmp


Click Enter.



Open the generated log file and check for errors.
Navigate to the temporary site and examine restored content. Pull out required documents and upload to the required site, check with user before deleting temporary site.
Delete .cmp file and log form MELAP01.

No comments:

Post a Comment