Discover the secrets to recover SharePoint Database & Complete Recovery Process!!

Are you tired of searching about SharePoint Database Recovery process and not knowing what you can actually do to recover it? If it is so then I would say your search ends here only, just read this article I am sharing the successful ways to recover your corrupt database from your own recovery steps. I am going to assume that you're little familiar with SharePoint recovery process so I am explaining it further.

Good, Better or Best Possible backup solution!

“Are SQL Server backups good enough?” Do I need a SharePoint Recovery inbuilt utilities?” The SQL Server Backup process only back up the SQL server databases. This strategy will not work if we want to recover full SharePoint recovery farm. As it is very common question of user i.e. which backup plan we should use to restore SharePoint database, often the real answer to this question is “it depends”. SharePoint is a complex platform & administrator knows that he need backup to safeguard their environments. There are many tools Microsoft makes available to backup SharePoint. The tools right fit in variety of situations and environments such as you can use the stsadm tool that comes with SharePoint to perform backups of individual content databases or collections. You can use System Center Data Protection Manager to backup full farm & so on.

Is your SharePoint Environment corruption free?

You should keep SharePoint's databases in good condition & corruption free by using standard maintenance tasks. If you are administrator of SharePoint then you should understand what are those maintenance tasks and to know for how and when to run them. First you need to check SQL Server setup is up to date with the latest patches and hotfixes. The appropriate solution to handle any corruption is daily update your database backups. The great part about Maintenance Plan is that you can use the Maintenance Plan Wizard to set it up. The wizard gives you the ability to add items such as database backups and transaction logs, to update database statistics, and to manage data such as indexes.

Made a Recovery Plan!

Database recovery planning for SharePoint environment includes ensuring the protection of their data and the continuity of all SharePoint operations. Microsoft made backup and restore capabilities that is present in the SharePoint 2007 & 2010 platform. The utilities are Native SQL Server Backup & Restore, Central Admin, Stsadm Utility, Recycle Bin & so on.

Microsoft also add many of the exciting new features into the SharePoint 2010 platform, such as unattended content database recoveries, SQL Server snapshot integration, and configuration-only backup and restore. 

A Few Words of Guidance!

You should also create your own maintenance task to make your SharePoint application corruption free. Before installation of SharePoint, you should set all automatic functions to make it better. Before applying these changes if your database gets corrupt then you don't need to worry about it. There are third party SharePoint Recovery tools available in market to resolve corruption errors & recover your data successfully. 

How to recover corrupt data from SharePoint Server farm

First you should know What is SharePoint Server Farm??

SharePoint Server Farm includes many servers or as few as two servers. A SharePoint server farm divided in to three categories: SMALL, MEDIUM, LARGE. You can choose one category as per your requirement. 

                               

              
              SharePoint Server Farm

Different Purposes of SharePoint Server Farm:

Front End Web Server: The Web server role provides Web content to clients.

Front End Application Server: The application server role provides Office SharePoint Server 2007 services such as servicing search queries, and crawling and indexing content.

SQL Database Server:  SQL Database Server save all content of SharePoint sites etc.

Domain controller: Through this we can provide authorization and authentication services to users.

Small server farm consists of two-server, one servers hosts the Web front end and the application services, while the second server hosts the SQL Server database.

A medium server farm consists of a database server, an application server running Office SharePoint Server 2007, and one or two front-end Web servers running Office SharePoint Server 2007 and IIS.

A large server farm consists of two or more clustered database servers, several  front-end Web servers running Office SharePoint Server 2007, and two or more application servers running Office SharePoint Server 2007.

If data of SharePoint Server farm get corrupted then it can be happen due to two main causes like:

1. SQL Server Database get corrupt
2. SharePoint Site get inaccessible

Due to this, you are not able to perform lots of activities such as:

• Not able to open SharePoint Site
• Not able to open content database
• Not able to open SQL Server database
• Not Perform Any Activity at all & many more..

SharePoint Inbuilt utilities helps you to recover corrupt SharePoint data like

1. stsadm.exe
2. Central Administration user interface
3. SQL Server backup

But Sometimes these utilities are not able to perform complete SharePoint data recovery. In this case, I have another suggestion that is use of SharePoint Server Recovery Software. These Software’s recover data in most of the SharePoint corruption error conditions. No matters how big the farm, Software also recovers data from SharePoint Server Farm.

In what cases you should use content recovery in Office SharePoint Server 2007

Content recovery is small-scale activity, refers to recovering a single document or list or multiple documents which can be performed by end users and site administrators. So you should use this option when your document or list gets corrupted. You can use content recovery by using in built MS Office SharePoint Server 2007 feature i.e. versioning.

Versioning allows the document library to keep multiple copies of the same document. If one copy suffer with any document corruption issue like virus attack, software malfunction, hardware malfunction etc then you can use another copy of the document which is created by versioning feature. Only Documents and files can be versioned.

You can turn on versioning feature at Document Library page. Use these three steps to use versioning in-built feature:

• First click on the Settings menu,
• After that choose Document Library Settings.
• Go to General Setting’s section and then click on Versioning Settings.

The drawback of versioning feature is that it can only recover corrupted documents or lists. If you want to recover corrupt SharePoint site content or any other corruption apart from documents or lists corruption, you cannot use versioning feature. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides some other in-built utilities to recover corrupt SharePoint database but all utilities have their own limitations. In some cases you can use those in-built features but some cases you are not. If your SharePoint data get severely corrupt, in this case you cannot use these utilities. You have another option to tackle with these corruption issues that is use of Third-party SharePoint Server Recovery Software.
 

Third party SharePoint recovery software provides SharePoint data recovery from the item level to the farm level. It means, it recovers any type of data corruption either in site or content database. They have no limitations & recovers corrupt SharePoint data in most possible cause of corruption. First use demo version of any recovery software.

What happened when SharePoint Site Collection get corrupted

As we all knows SharePoint site collection is the collection of SharePoint sites. Sometimes, we cannot access our SharePoint site collection that means something is really messed up with SharePoint site collection. After done some research on Google, I found two possibilities of this SharePoint site collection behavior - either SharePoint server isn't running properly or SharePoint site collection get corrupted. If SharePoint Site collection gets corrupted, then there is also a possibility of SharePoint Content database corruption because all the data of SharePoint site has been saved into the content database.

Uncountable reason behind these two possibilities:

• improper system shutdown
• SharePoint server malfunctioning
• software malfunctioning
• virus attacks
• Hardware Problem
• Connection break between SharePoint site & content database
• And many more…

If SharePoint server isn't running properly, you can fix it by re-installing SharePoint Server again.

Problems occur when SharePoint site collection gets corrupt:

• Cannot perform any activity on site collection
• Cannot access full SharePoint site collection
• Cannot access some sites of SharePoint site collection
• Cannot access your content database

To resolve this issue you should use SharePoint server in-built utilities to restore your SharePoint site collection, so the first thing that is very important for SharePoint administrators as well as for all users who used SharePoint server to understand what in-built utilities are and to know the best practices for how and when to run them. There are lots of in-built utilities available in SharePoint server which used in different conditions such as command line tool stsadm, SharePoint Central Administration, SQL server backups etc.

There is one another solution that is use of Third party SharePoint Server Recovery Software. User can easily use these software by given instruction just needs to download demo version. All software related information is available in help file of software. You can easily check the preview of your database in demo version.

Sharepoint Configuration Database Get Corrupted What to do???-Restore Or Recovery

SharePoint configuration database is an very important part of SharePoint Server because it keeps information about other databases, servers and services that incorporate the farm. It also keep information about Web applications, solutions, Web Part packages, site templates and farm settings specific to SharePoint technologies.


Have you suffered from SharePoint Configuration Database corruption error in SharePoint server 2007:


"Cannot connect to the configuration database"


Two common steps that we follow after database corruption:


1) “When we suffer from any corruption first need to restore corrupt database from updated backup.“

2) “After that, used any in-built utility to restore corrupt database.“


But in case of Configuration Database restoration these two steps won't work.


Note: We can easily back up configuration database by using the built-in tools. But restoring backups of the configuration database from a farm by using the built-in tools is not supported in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. This is because data in these databases may not be synchronized with data in other Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 databases.


In this situation you should use third party software to recover corrupt SharePoint configuration database. These software recovers corrupt SharePoint database in case of no backup.

How to recover corrupt SharePoint Database by using SQL Server database Backup

SharePoint can be configured for all services to run on a single server. A popular SharePoint deployment might consist of a small three-tier server farm with a data tier consisting of back-end SQL Server databases where all of the content is stored, a Web tier to deliver content to users, and an application tier hosting background services and applications.
If you want to prevent your SharePoint data from corruption then first you should prevent data tier as I described in earlier lines bulk of SharePoint information resides in a SQL Server database.

You can use advanced utility DBCC CHECKDB to check database integrity and fix the database corruption. If your database corrupt severely then DBCC CHECKDB cannot handle database corruption.

How to prevent severely corrupt SharePoint Database:

You can use two methods to prevent your database ie Restore & Recovery.

Both methods use in different situations like if your database get corrupt & you have backup then you can use restore option & if you don't have backup then you can use recovery option.

Use Restore option:

• Restore the content database from SQL Server updated backup.
• Go to Sharepoint Centre Admin->Application Management->Content databases and attach the content database.
• Reset IIS
• Reset SharePoint site collection administrator.

If restore option does not work to recover your corrupt database then you should use recovery option. Use good SharePoint Recovery Software to recover corrupt SharePoint database. Stellar Phoenix SharePoint Server Recovery Software not even recover corrupt SharePoint database but also recover inaccessible SharePoint site content.