Zach Rosenfield

I recently noticed Michael Blumenthal's blog post on the need to backup a site collection before backing it up. This is absolutely the recommended practice—and everyone should do it! Since there is a need, I thought I'd throw together a PowerShell script to do the complete operation in a single command. Here's the outline of my design for the "Backup-SPSite" function script:

First, I want to be able to call this as a function, so I create the global function declaration with my parameters and checks:

function global:Backup-SPSite($url,$path, lock="noaccess",$additionalcommands){

$stsadm = "$env:programfiles\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN\STSADM.EXE"

#Check Required Vars

If($url -eq "" -or $url -eq $null ){ Write-Host -ForegroundColor "Red" "URL is required"; return; }

If(!($lock -like "none" -or $lock -like "noadditions" -or $lock -like "noaccess" -or $lock -like "readonly" )){

Write-Host -ForegroundColor "Red" "Lock must be 'none', 'readonly', 'noaccess', or 'noadditions'"; return;

}

Next, I store the site's current lock state and then lock the site collection:

$oldlockstate = [xml](&stsadm -o getsitelock -url $url)

$void = &stsadm -o setsitelock -url $url -lock $lock

Then I backup the Site Collection, using any additional parameters the user wants with the "AdditionalCommands" Variable:

$sTemp = &stsadm -o Backup -url $url -filename $path $AdditionalCommands

if(!($sTemp -like "*Operation completed successfully*")){ Write-Host -ForegroundColor "red" -BackgroundColor "white" "Backup of site '$url' Failed! `n $stemp"}

Finally, I reset the lock state and end the function block

$void = &stsadm -o setsitelock -url $url -lock ($oldlockstate.SiteLock.Lock.ToString()) }

That's it! I added this script to my profile 'bootstrap' and then I can backup site collections by simply typing a command like: backup-spsite -url "http://localhost" -path "C:\zbackuptest.bak" -AdditionalCommands "-overwrite". The full script with additional progress information is available here, and as always, use at your own risk!