SharePoint recovery. The Hard Way

I'm in the process of learning how to use Windows Movie Maker. My Grandfather is turning 80 this February, and we're throwing him a big party. I own getting family pictures together into a 1/2 hour show and displaying them at the party. How does this relate to SharePoint? Well, I only have pictures for the parts of the family that I see regularly.

I sent out the email to the family members to log into my sharepoint site and upload pictures so I can put them into the slideshow.

Being the computer wiz I am, while I was trying to figure out where to tell people to put the pictures, I ended up deleting the biggest document library! Lucky for me, I followed the steps on how to backup SharePoint in the Backing up and Restoring Small Business Server. These steps are also in the on-the-box help in the Backup Snap-in.

However, a few months back, I wasn't that smart, I lost my entire SharePoint site. (they say you always backup after you've had a disaster... well, chalk me up for that). Fortunately, I had been running SBS Backup, so my SharePoint database was stored in MSDE format contained within the backup! Could I use this flat file to recover my SharePoint site?

Sorta. :)

I was able to get the site up and running on a 2nd SBS box, to the point that I could get to the site via the \\unc path to get the files out of. Apparently the site wouldn't load because it couldn't find one of my plug-ins that I had installed.

Here are the steps that I followed:

1. Un-install the SharePoint MSDE instance


2. Rename the data directory for the original SharePoint database (%program files%\microsoft sql server\mssql$sharepoint\data) to something else


3. Re-install the Intranet component again using the maintenance mode of SBS Setup


4. Unextend the virtual server, using the command stsadm.exe -o unextenddvs -url http://companyweb


5. From the command prompt, use OSQL commands to detach the newly created database:
   
   
   • osql -E -S {servername}\SharePoint
   
   
   • sp_detach_db 'STS_Config'
   
   
   • sp_detach_db 'STS_ServerName_1'


6. then use similar commands to attach the old databases from the backup:
   
   
   • osql -E -S {servername}\SharePoint
   
   
   • sp_attach_db 'STS_Config', '{path to old databases}\STS_Config.mdf', {path to old databases}\STS_Config.log.ldf'
   
   
   • sp_attach_db 'STS_ServerName_1', '{path to old databases}\STS_ServerName_1.mdf', {path to old databases}\STS_ServerName_1_log.ldf'
   
   
7. Extend the virtual Server using the command: stsadm.exe -o extendvsinwebfarm -url http://companyweb vsname companyweb

While I've not successfully gotten these proceedures to work to actually open up http://companyweb because my site had a web-part (which I couldn't re-find again). The webpart wouldn't load (since I believe it wasn't installed on the server), so the whole SharePoint site wouldn't load. Luckly I could browse to \\companyweb and access the files that way, extract all the files out and import them into the new SharePoint site.