Dude, I just spent the entire morning trying to restore a MOSS database and man did it suck. I was originally asked to delete a link to a document workspace from a site’s quick launch navigation. It looked like MOSS was playing tricks on me again, ever notice how sometimes subsites don’t get included on the parent’s quick launch? And sometimes they’re duplicated? In my case, I thought the user had just created duplicate workspaces so I just clicked on one and deleted the site. Should’ve been that simple right? Wrong…

 I went back to the parent site and both links were gone! I was like aww crap… I knew what had happened and I knew the recycle bin doesn’t support deleted sites. But I checked the recycle bins anyways. No dice. Next step – restore last night’s backup to a different server.

 This part just blew my mind, I had restored hundreds of content databases and attached them to web applications before no sweat. But for the life of me I couldn’t get any web applications I had created to recognize any of the sites in the content database. It would just say there was 0 sites in the site collection. After unsuccessfully trying to restore this database, I finally threw my hands up and booted up an old virtual machine that had a fresh MOSS 2007 install on it. Restored the database to that machine, created a new web application, attached the database and voila! Everything’s there.

Then I proceeded to use the content migration feature of SharePoint Designer to backup and restore the content. I have no idea why neither my production or test MOSS server wouldn’t recognize the sites from attached databases. Anybody else come across a similar problem?

Time to install the SharePoint Governance and Manageability tools from Microsoft IT…

SharePoint

May 31, 2007

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