Restoring SharePoint Application with SQL DB backup

If you are like most of implementer and don’t have third party application for granular restore of SharePoint, sooner or later you will be faced with restoring full application from SQL database backup.

Follow this procedure to restore content Db from backup and then use with same name on same SQL server. Here we will take backup of previous day and restore with same name. On SharePoint site, it gets interesting as you will need to detach this db before restore and then attach it to correct application.

• Detach the content db from application (run following two commands on one of SharePoint web server)

stsadm -o preparetomove -ContentDB content_db_name

stsadm -o deletecontentdb -url http://Site_URL -databasename Content_db_name -databaseserver DBServer_Name

(even when you are using deletecontentdb switch, you are just detaching the db, content remains on db until you restore and overwrite)

• Perform Database restore on SQL DB server, overwriting existing Database.

• Now attach this database back to web application

stsadm –o addcontentdb –url http://Site_URL -databaseserver DBServer_Name -databasename Content_db_name

This procedure will be also helpful if you ever wanted to move content database to new SQL server.

Ref: Very god Microsoft article on SharePoint Backup and Recovery