Write error on restore

Question

I am moving a site from one url to another within the same site collection.

1. Stsadm -o backup..... works great and says the operation completed successfully
2. since the guid's of everything stay the same during a backup... i deleted the orginal site. Operation competed successfully
3. Mind you this is production
4. stsadm -o restore Now I restore to another url location... whoops i get a Write error on file "wssxxxxxxxxxxx_1.tmp". Lovely
5. Now i can't put it back. Looking at having to get the collection from the database backup. Is there a way to get it back any other way?

Answer 1

So after investigating, I saw that others where having a similar issue with large sites.. 15+ GB. Now... my site only tops out at 1GB or so. There shouldn't be a problem right? Well if you consider that the underlying problem could be the actual room left on the physical drive you get closer to the issue here. With some IT outfits servers are deployed with a dinky C drive/partition for the os and a much bigger D drive/partition for 'Data'.

This setup does not work for SharePoint. Yell at your IT colleges if need be. There are some things that can be sloughed off to the d drive, but a lot of stuff happens on the C drive that you don't have control over. One of these is where SharePoint puts the temp file is uses during restoration. You guessed it the C drive. In addition it just makes sence not to have to move everything to the Data area for no reason. (If someone can tell me why people do this... it would be great.)

If that drive is fragmented and is down to it's last 100 MB or so stsadm will not be able to complete building whatever is in the temp file.

The answer here is to make sure that you have enough room for that temp file to be created. A good rule of thumb that I go by is that no partition should have less then 15% free disk space. This was a good rule in previous Windows OS's and I'm sticking to it.

Answer 2

I'm not sure that you have used the right method here. Stsadm -o backup will back up your entire site collection, not a subweb only. So, if you have backed up using this method and are attempting to restore the backup to another url within the site collection you have just backed up, it will fail. This is because it is trying to restore the entire site collection. You need to restore your backup to a new web application, or restore a database backup to restore the missing subweb. Then, once you have your subweb, you can use stsadm -o export and import to move it within the existing site collection.

Lori

Answer 3

Create a new content database with central admin your web app.

Create a managed path with your cental admin (explicit inclusion path)

restore with stsadm and use your new managed path like URL.

Dan

http://www.dannybrabant.com