Orphaned Items / sub sites disappearing

Question

Hi,

I have come up with an issue that I am perplexed with regarding orphaned items and sub sites disappearing (yet, still in the system)

I my particular case, I had rebuilt one of my site collections from scratch, via an import from another web app on the same server a few days prior to the orphaned notifications showing up. I intialised CA to 'Fix Automatically', which is what I am assuming it did.

Whilst I have not applied the April CU as yet (might aswell put June on now), I did end up doing a lot of OS patches recently (this may be a red herring), and the CA issues list started saying I had orphaned items.

Essentially, one of my sub-sites has disappeared completely from view and on another site within the same SC, a further sub-site (blog) from that has disappeared. There is nothing in the recycle bins, yet, when I try to re-add the site using the same URL, it error's out. I also cannot delete the site from the front end as it believes the subsite is still there.

My approach is coming down to replacing the entire content database from a SQL backup, then importing the sites that I can still get to and export, over the top.

My questions therefore are:

What are the implications of having orphaned items within a content database and what would trigger them to become orphaned?

Is there a way to restore the items from backups to the same URL? I have tried this though it complains that the URL to restore to does not exist, though if I try to create it, I get a correlation error, obviously indicating that SP has a recollection that the URL exists.

How can I remove the entire Site Collection including all subsites and ensure that SP removes all knowledge of previous URL pathings? Or is it best to blow away the entire SC and Content DB and start again?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi,

As far as I know, many reasons can cause orphaned items in SharePoint. for example, interrupted site collection creating.

Yes, you restore the items from backup to the same URL, but you need to delete the orphaned items firstly.

I provide you a link which can help you about how to deal with orphaned SharePoint sites:

http://www.cjvandyk.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=299

Content databases contain orphaned items (SharePoint Foundation 2010)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff805076.aspx

Thanks,

Rock Wang

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Rock Wang TechNet Community Support

Answer 2

Many thanks Rock,

Whilst it does not explain, in my situation, why the sites simply disappeared from one day to the next, the above URL does explain nicely how to go about recovering from the situation which is useful.

In my case, I decided to export all current site's in my SC that were still working, restore the content DB to a previous date and import the working sites over the top. I managed to regain my 'missing' sites and the data loss on these particular ones was negligible.

I will however go through the DB and check for orphaned content and remove it, as I have a managed path I cannot get rid of and the SC and DB no longer exist.

Cheers.