Quickly restore a deleted site collection through Power Shell Command

One day I received a call from a frantic customer who accidentally deleted a very valuable site and needed it restored ASAP. I was still new, so their panic started to make me panic - especially when I heard that the deleted site had also been emptied from the Recycle Bin and the process to restore a site from SQL takes more time than we had. 

Luckily, one of my team members was watching over my shoulder and said, “Use PowerShell to find the site and then restore it - it shouldn't even take 10 minutes."

Brilliant! Here are the PowerShell commands to restore a deleted SharePoint site:

Get-SPDeletedSite | select Path , siteid

(This will generate a list of all deleted sites and their GUIDs as seen below) 

Then, run the command:

      Restore-SPDeletedSite -Identity (SITE ID)

(in this case,    

Restore-SpDeletedSite –Identity 4bff0c0e-4d56-4fec-8174-a60a16daeaac)
 This final command will restore the site

Finding a Correlation ID error through Power Shell Command

One frustrating error SharePoint users will occasionally experience is the dreaded 'red X' with a cryptic correlation ID error. When that happens, the SharePoint Administrator must perform the equally frustrating task of looking through the logs to find the cause of the error. 

  

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a command that will search the log files for the correlation ID?  The command Merge-SPlogfile will automatically search the logs for the error ID. Better than that, the command will search ALL the servers in the farm and place a log file on the server that you will the command.  Here is an example of the the Merge-SPlogfile command

Merge-SPLogFile -Path -Correlation <Guid>
(I typically run the command like this using the Correlation ID from sample error above.)

Merge-SPlogfile –Path c:\log.log –Correlation ba05e237-0680-403a-b9f6-e49f96ac55d4
(That will place a .log file on the C drive of the server which will only contain errors with the correlation ID.)