How to Restore SharePoint Site Collection

SharePoint site collection is a group of sites that can be managed and grouped together. It contains many sites and all have some common features like content types, web parts, shared permission, and galleries for templates. The main important point is that all the sites in site collection share a common navigation. All the sites are organized in hierarchy; a subsite is a single site in the collection and can inherit navigation and permission from its parent site. Sometimes, a database administrator is unable to access the site content due to corruption. A corrupt or damaged SharePoint site content can be recovered from the backup.

Important: SharePoint site collection should be created by service administrator while a subsite can be created by the user of SharePoint site collection.

Why Use this? SharePoint site collection is used for the better maintenance of group projects. Suppose you have several projects to manage. It is recommended you to create a SharePoint site collection and divide all the projects as subsite for the collection.

Backup & Restore SharePoint Site Collection: Microsoft SharePoint services 3.0 offers a tool to backup and recover SharePoint site collection i.e. Stsadm command line tool. This tool is very fast and flexible to backup and recover SharePoint site collection content.

Backup SharePoint Site Collection: You have to follow the below steps to take the backup of SharePoint site collection using Stsadm command line tool.

• Change the directory “%COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft shared\Web server extensions\12\Bin” on which SharePoint is installed.
• Run this command “stsadm -o backup -url <URL name> -filename <\\server. name\folder name\file name> [-overwrite]” on command prompt.
• Command prompt will show the message “backup completed successfully”.

Restore SharePoint Site Collection: For restoring SharePoint site collection, you have to follow the steps as shown below:

• Change the directory “%COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft shared\Web server extensions\12\Bin” on which SharePoint is installed.
• Run this command “stsadm -o restore -url <URL name> -filename <UNC path>” on command prompt.
• If prompt ask for id & password then type correct id & password.
• Command prompt will show the message “restore completed successfully”.

Note: To perform backup and restore operation on SharePoint site collection, database administrator must be the member of administrator group on the local computer.