Gradualdelete is new

With the WSS/SharePoint April 2009 Cumulative Update, a new parameter was introduced for the “stsadm –o deletesite” and “stsadm –o mergecontentdbs” commands. I noticed it while reviewing some recently published/update TechNet articles and tweeted about it here, here, here and here. Because of that I wanted to summarize the content in one post, point out some other things I found while researching and point you to where you can get more detail. On The Sean Blog, Sean covers all the commands added in the April update.

Here are the things that jumped out at me:

1. There is a new property added which is where the SPTimer schedule for the deletion job is stored and marks the site collection for deletion so it can no longer be accessed.

2. To restore a large site collection (see the Note), you can use the gradualdelete parameter with deletesite and mergecontentdbs to help the process. This is the article that got me looking everything else up.

Also, a note I saw while doing this review…MS is recommending you install the April 2009 update before continuing to use the mergecontentdbs command (see the Important note).

To be the most current on your deployment, you will want to install Service Pack 2 and then the April 2009 Update.

This post was all over the place. I hope it was still helpful. Well…it has been a long time since I have posted so hopefully this post will get me back onto the blog wagon.