Backing up Sites with STSADM utility In this video, we will take a look at backing up a Windows SharePoint Services Site Collection using the command line tool STSADM.exe. We will examine the backup process as well as possible business scenarios that would benefit from this procedure. Keep in mind this video explores backing up an entire Site Collection. Please return to SharePoint Screencasts.com for more information on backing up only a specific Site, List, or Library or for more information on backing up an entire SharePoint server. Here we go. Before we get started with the backup procedure itself, just a quick reminder, STSADM.exe is a command line utility for SharePoint. Therefore it operates under the Operating Systems authority. You must have Administrator privileges in the Windows Server Operating System in order to perform STSADM commands. If your SharePoint server is a member server in a domain, you will need to visit Computer Management. Once in Computer Management, you want to make sure that your User account is a member of the Administrator s local group of your server or has been granted similar rights and permissions. If, however, your SharePoint server is also a domain controller, which is not a Microsoft best practice, but can be found in smaller shops, then you want to visit Active Directory Users and Computers, making certain that your User Account is at least a member of the built in group administrators. It is not necessary, however, to make your User a Domain Admin. As membership in Domain Admins would be granting far too much privilege for simply executing STSADM commands. Lastly, keep in mind that STSADM will be executed from the command prompt of the Operating System of the local equipment. Let us get started. Here we have Collaboration Portal, the topmost site in a Site Collection. There are several sites underneath including News, Document Center, Reports, Search, and even the WSS Collaboration Site called Triple H Farms. This entire Site Collection will be backed up using STSADM. Here we are at the command line, notice the path, you need to run STSADM from this residence path of BIN in the 12 hive for SharePoint, or you have to add this entire destination to your path search in your Operating System. Launching STSADM.exe with a /? provides the help files for the Utility. You can see the bevy of operations that can be performed within STSADM. We are going to focus on Backup and
Restore. Notice also that for any more information about any individual operation, you can always type in STSADM.exe help and then name the operation. For instance, here I have used the Help mechanism to look at the Backup operation. For a Site Collection backup, all I need to execute is the STSADM with a o for operation name and the name backup. Then I can provide the following parameters, the url, which is the http call in its entirety to the topmost site in the Site Collection; file name parameter will allow me the UNC path and file name of the destination backup file; overwrite will overwrite the contents of that file name as opposed to the default behavior which is to append. For the purpose of this video, we will focus on Site Collection backups. However, notice the backup operation of STSADM can also be utilized for Catastrophic backups. All you need to do is supply the backup method parameter in place of the URL parameter. This will allow you to perform a backup of an individual Database, Web Application or the entire SharePoint server farm. If you decide to perform a Catastrophic backup, please revisit SharePoint Screencasts.com and check out the video on performing Catastrophic backups using STSADM. Now just a reminder this is our Pre backup Structure We have the Collaboration Portal home, we have several Sub Sites underneath, some of which have children sites of their own. So back here at the Command Prompt, when we execute our STSADM command to backup the portal.home.local topmost site, we simply follow the syntax instructions o for operation, url to specify the entire http called to the topmost site, file name to specify the destination of the backup. I am going to put it this in stsbackups folder that I created just for this purpose and I will call it scbackup.bak. Now if they were already in scbackup.bak file in this folder and it contained the results of a previously issued backup statement, I might want to use the overwrite parameter to replace the contents. It is not necessary at this point since this is the first backup we are creating into this bak file. We will let this run and well our operation completed successfully. Just to prove it, we will take a look at Windows Explorer in that stsbackups folder, sure enough there is a scbackup.bak file and you can see that it contains some content. Now let us go modify the structure. Since we have created a backup, we will go and add Endeavor News underneath the News site. We will also make some changes to the security of Collaboration Portal. So, here we go to the News site and we
will go into Site Actions to create a Sub Site under News. And now that the new Endeavor News site is created we will return to Collaboration Portal and we will go under Site Actions Site Settings People and Groups to a New Group, and we will name this one Endeavor Designers, and we will return to Collaboration Portal. So we have made a couple of changes we have changed the structure, we added Endeavor News under the News site, you can see it in the drop down and then we also changed some of the security parameters of Collaboration Portal by adding a new SharePoint group. Now let us say in our business scenario, the reason we performed our backup before making those two changes to Collaboration Portal was just to follow a Microsoft best practice of backing up a Site Collection before making significant configuration changes to it. Remember this is the way it looked before we added the New Site and this is what it looks like now with the new Endeavor News. So, our management has asked us to return to this structure and we will perform a Restore to make this happen. Now remember a Restore operation in STSADM is really very similar to the backup operation. The parameters are very similar url to the topmost site; filename to point to the backup file that contains the backup content we wish to restore; you also have the overwrite to overwrite the existing contents, we will use these parameters because we are going to be overwriting a healthy existing Site Collection. The only time you do not need overwrite is when you are restoring the Site Collection into a new location such as a separate Web Application, perhaps for testing or sandbox reasons and there is not an existing web site already in that location of the same URL. You also can include custom host headers and it will help SharePoint find the exact content in the Sequel Content Database. Notice this is a Site Collection restore, since we performed a Site Collection Backup, this is the procedure we will use. However you can also restore Catastrophic backup files and for more information on Catastrophic backups and restores, please return to SharePoint Screencasts.com for more advanced videos on Catastrophic recovery. Just one more note before we get started with Restore In order to perform a restore of a Site Collection, you have to be connected to SharePoint as a Site Collection Administrator for the Site Collection being restored. It is not enough to simply be in the Operating System Administrator s Group.
So, we will go ahead and execute the STSADM operation to restore the URL as portal.home.local and the file name that contains the backup we wish to restore is that scbackup.bak file that I placed earlier into the stsbackups folder. We will use the overwrite parameter to make sure it overwrites the existing content. Keep in mind also that this Restore process is replacing data contained in a Sequel Content Database over in Sequel Server. So please make sure that you are using the correct Windows or Sequel Authentication as dictated by your sequel DBA and make sure you are connecting into the sequel instance that contains your SharePoint databases with the authority to write into this SharePoint content database. Well, our operation completed successfully. And just to prove it, let us go and look at the Collaboration Portal. Sure enough, under News, the Endeavor News Sub Site has disappeared and under All Groups in People and Groups, there is no Endeavor Designers SharePoint group. There are many business scenarios that can make use of a Site Collection Backup. Reverting back to Prestructures Only One, another reason might be to move or copy an entire Site Collection to an alternate location. For more information on relocating a Site Collection, please return to SharePoint Screencasts.com for the video on moving a Site Collection using STSADM. This can be performed using the Backup and Restore you just witnessed or the Import Export operations available in STSADM. And yet another might be for the purpose of automating or scripting. STSADM is a non interactive command lying tool. Notice at no point during this demonstration did it prompt us for any additional input, it only accepted the parameters that we typed in the original statement. That makes STSADM a wonderful candidate for automating in a.bak script scheduling with Windows Servers Scheduled Tasks Utility. In this presentation, we examined backing up a Site Collection using STSADM.exe backup operation and reverting to a pre backup structure using STSADM s Restore operation. We explored the use for this procedure, either to Revert a Site Collection or it can be used to move a Site Collection from one web application to another. For more information on other backup options regarding SharePoint and/or moving Site Collections using alternate STSADM operations, please revisit SharePoint Screencasts.com for more videos.