James Edelen‘s Sharepoint Database Explorer saved my butt today.  Thank you James!  And a special tip-of-the-hat to Catapult Systems, a local consulting company we use for Windows, Exchange, Sharepoint, SMS help… Richard Calderon, one of their top-notch folks, reminded me of the tool about 5 minutes after asking for some help.

Here’s the story:

1. We still have a legacy Sharepoint WSS site hanging around that was set up for beta use, but ended up being used in production (I’m sure many are familiar with this horrible practice)
2. Since it was a beta server, it never got proper backup mechanisms put into place.
3. All it had for backup was SQL Server-based backup.  And it was WMSDE at that. 
4. So then (you know it), someone “accidentally” deletes an entire document library containing 1,381 critical files. (insert comment here about “well if it was critical, why was it on a beta server without proper backups”)
5. I take that backup, create a new database on another SQL server and restore the backup to the new database.
6. Thankfully, I see the DOCS table and I’m able to do a SQL query and I do see the documents in there
7. I try all sorts of ways to import these rows to another sharepoint database to see if I can browse them, but it never fully works.
8. However, I point James’ way cool db explorer tool to this restored database, and it immediately lets me browse through the sites, document libraries, and multi-select all the documents in the library and save it locally.
9. Then all I need to do is manually re-upload the documents into a newly-created document library

Woohoo!

Misc items:

1. This doesn’t restore versions automatically.  The tool does, however, let you restore versions one at a time.
2. We’re still looking for a decent backup tool that’s more automated for deleted items so we have undelete or the ability to restore documents, lists, items, document libraries or even full sites.  I don’t like our current backup method.  We own Backup Exec and also the sharepoint module for backup exec but it doesn’t seem to give us document-level restore.
3. I met and worked with James some at the 2004 MVP summit.  He’s quite a gifted person, full of all sorts of talent.  It was an honor to work with him the very little that I did.  I know he did a lot of work with the Resource Kit with Bill English and a bunch of other MVP’s.