As the saying goes, its sometimes better to do something yourself than have someone else do it for you. The same is true for the Central Admin site as there are always some issues with some functions and I just prefer doing most administrative tasks via stsadm. I found stsadm to be the easiest and simplest way of doing majority of administrative functions. One of tasks is backing up and restoring SharePoint site collections.

Browse to SharePoint Directory

1. Launch the command prompt
2. Type cd “%programfiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN”

Backup Site Collection

1. Type stsadm -o backup -url <url> -filename <filename>
   • <url> is the url of the site collection that you want to backup
   • <filename> is the filename of where to store the site collection

What’s Not Included During Backup?

1. My Sites
2. Sub site collections.

Keep this in mind when doing a backup.

Restore Site Collection

1. Type stsadm -o restore -url <url> -filename <filename> -overwrite
   • <url> is the url of the site collection that you want to restore
   • <filename> is the filename of where to store the site collection
   • overwrite be cautious with this command as you don’t want to overwrite the wrong site collection

Possible Security Error during Restore

Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED)).

Now you might possibly have an issue during the site collection restore process. This can happen when the the account that you used to do the backup was not the site administrator and during your restore process, it will fail for you. There is a way to fix that in case you are at another location during the restore process and can not run the backup with the correct user account. What you will notice after the restore process not working that the Event Viewer will contain information on what user account does not have access to perform this action.

1. Launch Event View and view the System Events
2. Look for the system will complain about a DECOM event .. starting with: “The application specific permission settings do not grant local activation for …. with CLSID XXXX ….. to the user referencing a ‘domain name service account’”.

   

3. Make a note of the CLSID as we will need that later on.
4. Goto Administrative Tools -> Component Services
5. Click on Component Services and then Computers and then My Computer (depending on your computer name)
6. Click on DCOM Config and change the view to show the items in Details view
7. Look for the item that matches your CLSID
8. Right click on the item that matches the CLSID and click on Properties
9. Select the Security tab
10. Click edit next to Customize under the Launch and Permissions section
11. You will notice that the user that you were trying to run the command is not part of the security listing
12. Add the user and reboot the system

That should fix up any issues with restoring a site.  Have you had any problems with backing up and restoring SharePoint site collections?

If you would like to take this a bit further, why not read Joel’s post, SharePoint Backup Restore, High Availability, and Disaster Recovery.

External Resources

• MSKB 833797 How to back up and restore installations of Windows SharePoint Services that use Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (Windows)
• Backup: Stsadm operation (Office SharePoint Server)
• How to Backup Windows SharePoint Services - Robert Bogue [MVP]