I came across a situation at work where I had to run the stsadm -o export command to backup my development SharePoint sites. My restore options were limited because I was only allowed to access Central Administration on my development SharePoint server, but NOT on the Production servers. I was also unable to remote to the Production SharePoint server, nor did I have the ability to schedule a Content Deployment job from Central Admin.

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UPDATE: Thanks to another post about this issue, here is a link to Microsoft’s instructions about going thru this process, as well as other updates not mentioned in my post. Please check here for more thorough instructions: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934838/en-us.

Monday morning, I came into the office and discovered the network team reset the passwords to our SharePoint service accounts. It wasn’t their fault since we (the developers) were using production service accounts instead of test accounts in our development environment. (more…)

Mauro Cardarelli wrote a nice “to the point” article on how to recover a site collection from the SQL database backups. You can find his article here: http://blogs.officezealot.com/mauro/archive/2007/12/12/20674.aspx

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You go to your portal this morning and instead of seeing the home page you are greeted with a ’404′ error page. Something is wrong! You look in Central Administration and you notice that your Web Application is there but the site collection is gone. Ouch! Time to recover…

In this scenario, let’s assume that you have NOT been doing site collection backups but you do have SQL backups. You notice that last night’s content database backup is considerably smaller than the night before (yes, you have been saving multiple days of backups). Phew! Your data is all there; we just need to reconnect it. Here’s how:
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