Let me give a little back ground. We have a Sharepoint 2007 Farm with SQL 2005 backend servers. We use the Quest Recovery Manager tool to restores sites. Currently we have about 20 content db's that contain top level sites collections and sites. The challenge we have is when we need to restore a site that has been deleted. There is no easy way to determine which content database that site once existed in. Does anyone have a process they would share that would be able to extract the sites and sub sites from the SQL tables supporting those content databases so that when we have a need to restore a site we can reference that data to determine which content database we'll need to restore from. Thanks in advance. Timcautiously optimistic

So in brief the question is can we get a list of sites and sub-sites by accessing a content database in read mode? Microsoft object strongly to doing anything with the database including reading it but I don't think they refuse to support you if you have only read it so you should be OK. The main problem is that because they don't want people to mess with it they also don't issue a desxcription of its architecture. Why don't you just go manual and note down in a file somewhere the names of content databases and add sites and sub-sites to that list when you create them? Also please confirm that the mention of Quest Recovery Manager actually has nothing to do with the question despite it's early positioning in the question. (Or did I get that wrong too?) FAQ sites: (SP 2010) http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com; (v3) http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com and (WSS 2.0) http://wssv2faq.mindsharp.com Complete Book Lists (incl. foreign language) on each site.

This is what that we follow in our large environment, Run the following command for each webapp in your farm and keep the .txt files the command gives the sitecollections along with the size and the database name and much other detils which helps. You can run it twice a week and zip the files together as .zip with datetime stamp for use at a later time when required. stsadm -o enumsites -url "url of the webapp" >c:\webappname.txt I LOVE MS..... Thanks and Regards, Kshitiz (Posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.)