Sharepoint back-up & restore problems.
This post is to warn about the dangers of restoring a SharePoint portal.
This week somebody accidentally deleted an area on a portal. Fotunately we had a sql back-up of our Sharepoint Database. However when trying to create a new portal to point to these databases something went wrong in the configuration database which resulted in our production portal not being available.
Research showed that the content was still present. Apparantly the restore had resulted in a change in the configuration database so that all the sites pointed to the restore portal instead of our production portal.
After an update query to reset the DatabaseID's everything was fine again. This was tricky though since direct manipulation of the database is strongly dissuaded.
The good thing about this event is that now everybody is convinced we need a better back-up & restore procedure which was something I've been asking for a long time.
We will start with using the sharepoint back-up tool and later may-be buy a third party tool that is capable of restoring individual items.
Anybody got any experience to share about best practices for backing-up sharepoint portals and sites?