This week I worked on a two day introduction to SharePoint with a new client. The goal was to install and then give them a quick tour of the features with emphasis on Excel services. We completed the install on the first day and did a backup in preparation for the following days exploration.
The following days we covered a lot of ground and then to wrap up I was going to do some backups and show them how to use the Central Admin Backup. I selected backup and full farm and then waited for the job to show up, refresh, refresh…..refresh... where was my backup. I deleted the job and tried again
same thing. We checked the database permissions and folder permissions - everything seemed fine - backup had worked the night before.
I decided to the run backup by command line using stsadm - success - the backup began and then stopped or hung during the search database backup. I waited - but it did not complete. Last line displayed was
[Shared Search Index] 50 percent complete.
Since we had configured search in the morning - I now understood why the backup completed the day before. At this point my client and I hit the web and started searching for information.
He came up with this - http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2403806&SiteID=1
This led us to a Hot Fix from Microsoft - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934525
Our timer job was delayed by an hour - 938663 One-time timer jobs in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or in SharePoint Server 2007 are delayed by at least one hour when the jobs are scheduled to occur during daylight saving time (DST) .
We installed the hotfix and ran the backup again using stsadm - after a few tense moments the backup completed. We then tried from the Central Administration interface - the job showed up and completed.
Backup fixed!
I recently attempted, and mostly succeeded in exporting a complete Publishing site collection from a development environment into Production. I had many problems and issues with the whole process, but eventually got it up and working after rebuilding most of the approval workflows by hand.
One of the items I missed until accidentally stumbling upon it was the following: View Reports in Site Actions, or "Views" in Content and Structure were doing nothing. The page would load, no errors were seen, and yet no data was ever displayed.
After significant and fruitless searching, I came across Marc's blog here. Marc hit the nail on the head and this turned out to be my exact problem.
The SPWeb object contains a property (in AllProperties) called _SmtReportsListId. This property contains a GUID that points to the Reports List. This is a hidden list called Content and Structure Reports that contains those individual reports you are accustomed to seeing in the Content and Structure views (Checked Out to Me, Pending Approval, etc.)
When I imported the site collection, the _SmtReportsListId GUID was still pointing at the old list from development. This may be due to my need for fiddling with the publishing settings in order to get the import to work.
In order to fix this problem, this GUID needs to be set to the new (local) correct Content and Structure Reports list found at the root of your site collection.
This was accomplished using a small console application Marc wrote. It can be found in the link to his blog. In order to figure out the GUID of the list I needed to point to, I used the very handy program "SharePoint Manager 2007" which can be found here.
I hope this helps,
-Ryan