SharePoint 2003 Site Restore Fun (0)
April 14th, 2008 by Emil in Microsoft, Sharepoint 2003
When I run backups on SharePoint, I do both database backups and individual site backups via a script utilizing the stsadm.exe tool. This gives me the opportunity to both be able to be granular in my restores and also be ready for a disaster scenario.
Today I had to restore a whole site from a .dat file. Simple enough, right? Fire up stsadm and type:
stsadm -o restore -url http://path/to/site -filename e:\backup\path\of\file.dat -overwrite
At first everything seemed like it will be fine. Since this is a command line utility, I didn’t have a progress bar to give me hope, but I was sure of the process and of the outcome; or so I thought…
After 4-5 hours of waiting for the restore to finish, the SharePoint portal went down. The reason was a complete re-crawl of the ENTIRE portal and non-portal data. This kind of thing is done at night and on weekends for a reason! Why did I wait 5 hours? Well, the site in question was 10GB in size. The biggest restore I did up to that point was during off hours and of a 500MB site.
There is no clear cut answer to this on SharePoint 2003. I tried stopping the search service, but this didn’t stop the re-crawl. The solution ended up being desperate–a reboot. I had backups for all the data in case the worst happened. So I rebooted and I waited. The server came back online and after taking around 45 minutes to recheck the databases, it finally settled down and became accessible to everyone. In addition to this, the site restore I was doing also turned out to be successful.
The moral of the story in my case is not to trust SharePoint 2003 with anything. It’s a decent piece of software and 2007 is even better. It just always seems to do things just a bit off of what a person would expect–enough to get you in hot water.
