So we all know that Sharepoint 2007 has a fancy recycle bin. Well thats all good except if you delete an entire site or site collection itself. Then it doesn't show up in the recycle bin. Yes you read that right, not even in the administrator's recycle bin - that site - is "Gone".

Now you may think, as a good ASP.NET developer, that backing up databases is good enough. No it ain't.

So, here is something that I know you will find useful, note this down so you won't forget it.

Even if you haven’t customized (i.e. modified the css/aspx/.master files) the site, there is still a lot of configuration information that sites in SharePoint_Config databases, shared services etc.

The best way to backup a SharePoint site is –

Stsadm –o backup –url <SiteURL> -filename <FileName>

And then at a later date you can restore the site using

Stsadm –o restore –url <restoretoURL> -filename <filetorestorefrom>

A few things to be wary of –

a) The above commands must be run using proper access rights, or the restore will be half crap.

b) The above commands will restore/backup the site collection you specify at the URL. What it won’t restore is, all the configuration you need to do under shared services or SCAW. Say, if you had trusted locations defined under excel services, forms services configuration, search scopes – all that must be backed up separately.

c) You should still plan on backing up databases as a last oh shit resort.