Brainlitter » Dude, My SharePoint Site is Read Only All of a Sudden

Dude, My SharePoint Site is Read Only All of a Sudden

I’ve seen this enough times lately that it was time to blog it.

 

The Issue

SharePoint Site that is normally accessible exhibits Read Only behavior and even for the site owner, could look a little like this…

 

Figure 1 : Dude, where’s my settings option?

 

Figure 2 : Dude, where’s my Owner Settings?

 

The Reason/Solution

Okay, there could be a number of reasons for this. But a common one may be that you are performing scheduled STSADM Site Collection Backups (particularly those of you in the SMB space on a budget that can’t use 3rd party tools or have access to Full SQL and Database Maintenance Plans. And, since the delivery of SP2 for WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007, STSADM Backups now set the site collection to ‘Read Only’ during the operation. As such, backups that were running in the early evening that previously were not disruptive, all of a sudden give off weird results. So, with that… The fix?

 

  1. You could move the backup job to a window that is not going to interfere with business (simple and ensures the site collection is protected/read only during the backup)
  2. You could modify your STSADM Backup job to use the new switch provided which is –NoSiteLock (reference: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263441.aspx)