Remove Ability for Users to Delete a Site and site backup before site get deleted by Admin users

Question

How can I achieve the following scenario:

• General users are unable to delete sites.
• Site/Site Collection backup needs to be taken before it's deleted by admin users anywhere in the sharepoint web farm.

Answer 1

For site/site collection backups, you could try hooking into the WebDeleting and SiteDeleting event receivers and take the backups before it is deleted.

Answer 2

Only those users with elevated privileges of the Owners group or Site Collection Administrators can even see the Site Actions menu to delete, but for those users you can implement the following CodePlex project from Microsoft to take a 'Recycle Bin' snapshot of the site for posterity.

This will cover Site deleting. For Site Collections you would want to look to either 3rd party tools or creating a C#/Powershell daily or weekly snapshot solution.

Answer 3

Users can perform site backups using SharePoint Designer. This is only for SP2007, though. SPD no longer supports site backups in SP2010.

Answer 4

You can always save the Site coll as template using Site Settings > Site Actions > Save site as a template. Choose to include the content. Then go to the Solution gallery and save the template to disk. This is a WSP file that can be uploaded to another Solution gallery to recreate the site or deassembled using Visual Studio.