Causes Data Loss of SharePoint Database Corruption

Microsoft SharePoint Server is an advanced utility from Microsoft to create a collaborative environment. It contains various components, which include content database, site, and site collection. Content database is known as WSS_Content. It stores all the contents of the websites and is extremely important for running SharePoint services. However, under some situations, this database may get damaged and become inaccessible. This behavior causes severe data loss and put you in need of SharePoint recovery tools.

As a practical example of SharePoint content database corruption, consider the following scenarios-

• Viruses infected your system and it makes WSS_Content database inaccessible along with other SharePoint services.

• You format the hard drive and reinstall SharePoint server, and then restore data from backup. However, you can not attach the content database with newly installed SharePoint Server and can not access it.

• You see the following entries in Application Event Log of MS SharePoint Server-
  
  [SPContentDatabaseSequence] [DEBUG] [6/1/2010 9:29:10 PM]: Applying WYukon signature to SPContentDatabase Name=Exported_WSS_Content Parent=SPDatabaseServiceInstance Name=Microsoft##SSEE.
  
  Upgrade [SPContentDatabase Name=Exported_WSS_Content Parent=SPDatabaseServiceInstance Name=Microsoft##SSEE] failed.
  [SPManager] [ERROR] [6/1/2010 9:29:12 PM]: The signature of the public key is invalid.
  Signing object:[dbo].[AllDocs]
  [SPManager] [ERROR] [6/1/2010 9:29:12 PM]: at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection.OnError(SqlException exception, Boolean breakConnection)

After this behavior of Microsoft SharePoint, you can not access content database and you need to recover SharePoint data using specialized tools.

Resolution:

You can try out any of the following SharePoint recovery solutions to sort out this problem-

• The problem can be due to version compatibility of MS SharePoint Server. Thus you need to first of all upgrade your SharePoint application and then try to attach the content database with upgraded SharePoint.

• If the problem is caused by virus infection then use a specialized anti-virus application to scan the database and remove viruses from it.

• Check the database consistency and integrity using DBCC CHECKDB. It is an in-built tool of Microsoft SQL Server that lets you check the database and fix consistency issues. However, it can not handle severe corruption issues.

• Restore all your data from the most recent backup of SharePoint Content database.

If backup is not updated and all other methods fails to fix the problem, then you need to use third-party recovery applications to recover SharePoint 2007 and 2010 databases.