SharePoint 2010 restoring content database manually from sharepoint backup folder

Hello Everyone ,

In this article i am going to tell you how could you extract and restore a specific content database from backed up Sharepoint Full-Farm backup.
First lets have look our target content database which we want to restore . In my example the database name is “WSS_Content_5050” .

1) Open your Sharepoint Full Farm Backup folder. If you don’t know the backup folder  you can find  from Central Administration web site.

2) As you noticed when we order items by size in Sharepoint Full-Backup folder ( “spdbr0000”) you can see the biggest files . That files as usually  SQL backup files of sharepoint databases but which file is our content database ?

3) If you order items by Type you can find the file which we are looking for  named “spbackup.xml” .this file our backups index file in xml format.

4) than open this xml file in any editor and search your content database name in this file .

5) as you notices that “0000012A.Bak file . This is our content database’s backup file.
6) Copy this file to your SQL Server and now you can restore this file (if it is not corrupted)   via Sql Server Management Studio .