Recovering individual items

Use one of the following two methods of recovering individual SharePoint items:

• Attaching the content database to a non-original SharePoint farm (for example, to a SharePoint recovery farm). The method is available for SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010.

  It is necessary to attach the content database to a non-original SharePoint farm because each object in a farm must have a unique ID. So, you will not be able to attach the database to the original farm.

• Recovering from an unattached database. The method is available for SharePoint 2010 only.

  This method allows you to recover only the following types of items: sites, lists, or document libraries.

To recover SharePoint items via attaching the content database to a farm

1. Attach the content database to a SQL server as described in steps 1-5 of "Accessing SQL Server databases from a disk backup".
2. Attach the content database to a non-original SharePoint farm. To do this:
   1. Make sure that you are performing this procedure under a farm administrator account that is a member of the db_owner role of the database. If not, add the account to this role by using Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio.
   2. Run the following command on a front-end Web server:

      In SharePoint 2010:

      Mount-SPContentDatabase <database> -DatabaseServer <database server> -WebApplication <site url>

      In SharePoint 2007:

      stsadm.exe -o addcontentdb -url <site url> -databasename <database> -databaseserver <database server>

3. Open the SharePoint site and select the document to download.
4. After the downloading is complete, detach the content database from the SharePoint farm.
5. Detach the database and unmount the previously mounted volume as described in steps 7-8 of "Accessing SQL Server databases from a disk backup".

To recover SharePoint items from an unattached database

1. Attach the content database to SQL server as described in steps 1-5 of "Accessing SQL Server databases from a disk backup".
2. Recover the data as described in http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh269602.
3. Detach the database and unmount the previously mounted volume as described in steps 7-8 of "Accessing SQL Server databases from a disk backup".