SharePoint Designer 2007 Backup: Totally Broken for Sites Greater than 24MB in size
Did you know that SharePoint Designer 2007 backup (Site->Admin->Backup) is totally broken for sites greater than 24MB in size? ...even though SPD tells you it succeeded and you've carefully burnt months and months of your CMP backup files onto a growing stack of DVDs?
It's true. Validated by the SPD product group and PSS. ...and to "add insult to injury", MS isn't sure this will be fixed in time for SP1.
Here's a workaround:
Turns out that when SPD Backup triggers the creation of the server-side CMP file set, WSS does succeed in creating the complete CMP file set (7 files totally 156MB in one of my tests).
After SDP downloads the first CMP (and no more), all of the CMPs in the file set are deleted.
Guess where they end up? :-) …in the site collection Recycle Bin. :-) :-)
So the workaround is to use the WSS site collection Settings page to the restore all of the files in the CMP file set back to the root folder of the site collection.
Then in SPD, in the root folder, select all of the CMP files, right-click, select Publish and publish/copy them to a folder on your local computer.
I’ve only run one test but it was for one of our largest Apptix site collections and seems to work just fine.
“Stick that in your MS KB article and smoke it” :-)
Michael Herman
Parallelspace Corporation
p.s. There's probably an opening at MS for a WSS backup program manager position if anyone is interested. ;-)
p.p.s. FAQ: When SPD creates multiple .CMP files, you only have to list the first file in your restore command. SPD will automatically pickup and read the others. (In fact, SPD actually reads the last .CMP file first because it contains the manifest files (table of contents) for the backup. It then starts reading the first, second, ... .CMP to perform the actual restore.
UPDATE: Sept. 4, 2007. Microsoft has confirmed that the SPD 2007 Backup problem won't be fixed in the upcoming Office 2007 Service Pack 1.
It has been scheduled for a future service pack. (I would have expected Microsoft to place more value on a customer's SharePoint data).