There's a recycle bin for your Site Collection! Thank you PowerShell

As a SharePoint infrastructure administrator, I'm all about being able to delegate the ability to manage site collections to the users that really care about the data in that site. HOWEVER, sometimes even the most well intentioned site collection administrator may do the unthinkable and delete their own site collection and all the sub-sites within! If that happens in SharePoint 2013, however, you have no need to panic. Because you get to have one of these:

You get to go dumpster diving in a SharePoint Site Collection Recycle Bin!

But wait, you say, how do I get to this recycle bin when the normal way to access the recycle bin is a that Site collection Root, which I just deleted? The answer is... you guessed it, PowerShell!

Since the recycle bin is really maintained at the database level your site collection is still available for recovery, it is just a matter of using the right commands to undelete your site collection!

It's going to be a one-two punch.
1) Get your deleted site collection ID
2) Restore the deleted site collection

1) Get-SPDeletedSite | Select Path, SiteID

This will give you a list all the deleted site collections with their site collection ID values

2) Restore-SPDeletedSite -identity 4bfa0e0c-4e34-3b2a-9134-a23b13ababe1

The second command will restore the site collection and all subwebs from the recycle bin - no DBAs need to be awakened from their slumber!

Happy restoring!

 

SharePoint correlation IDs don't have to drive you crazy!

I have a serious love / hate relationship with SharePoint correlation IDs. You know - the ones that tell you that there was an error but are otherwise not very informative?


example of SharePoint 2013 Correlation ID

The beauty of Correlation IDs is that it you are given a reference point to track down log entries of relevance. Remember, it's not an error code, it is what it says it is - a correlation ID - a tool to grab related events in the log to get a better picture of why something failed and had to show you an on-screen error message!

You can use a Microsoft's now official (it used to be on CodePlex) Unified Log Service (ULS) Viewer to view the logs and even search by correlation ID, but you can also just fire up a SharePoint enabled PowerShell prompt and use Merge-SPlogfile to get the information faster!

This simple PowerShell cmdlet will allow you to search all the farm servers and find any instances of the correlation ID and show you the issues!
For example, to grab all of the events with the correlation ID in the graphic above and place the results in a text file instead of dumping on screen I would use the following command:

Merge-SPlogfile –Path c:\Mergelog.txt –Correlation 3410f29b-b756-694c-7a574ff74cab


For example, just today I just was getting an error when viewing content based on an external data type and received a correlation ID type error with little information in the error itself.

I ran the above command then opened excel and used the data tab in the ribbon to get external data from a text file and chose Tab Delimited. Then I formatted the results as a table and hid a few columns I'm not interested in.

The results looked like this:

Click to see larger

As you can see, the correlation ID is the same for all results (that's the point) so as I troll through the results I see things like error in the execution of the web part (true) and an Access Denied message from the secure store - and this was my problem, my user account hadn't been mapped to be able to use the secure store target application ID!

Let me know if this worked for you or if you have any questions! Happy searching!