Can the Top-Level-Site be recovered or does it need to be re-created?

Question

Yesterday I was working on a project and thought I was within that specific site when I wanted to delete it, but accidently deleted the main site of the Farm. Today I went into SPD and found that there are sub sites of the main site that are still available. Couldn't I just re-create the main site and have the sub sites pointing to the main site? There are no backups. :( BUT I did go through the database yesterday and noticed all of the lists, pages, etc. still reside there! Is this possible or is it more complicated than this?

Answer 1

Sounds like you deleted the top-level site collection in your web application. I believe if you delete the top-level site of a site collection, SharePoint automatically deletes the Site Collection. No - without a backup, there is now way to recover site or site collection deletions without a backup of your SQL database OR a backup of the specific site collection.