Most Common Reasons for Corruption in SharePoint Server

For any individual or organization who’s using the computer, data loss is always unaffordable. The two very common reasons for data loss are accidental deletion and corruption. Accidental deletion is caused by human, whereas corruption occurs due to various reasons. Since corruption is an inevitable occurrence, no computer file is immune to corruption. In these days, almost every business uses the computer to complete daily tasks. SharePoint is highly popular among businesses and organizations. It’s commonly used as a document management and storage system. Many customer/consumer oriented organizations use SharePoint to create websites. Here in this post, we’ll discuss Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), the most common reasons for corruption in SharePoint Server and how to repair SharePoint database.

Microsoft SharePoint

SharePoint is a browser-based collaboration and document management platform provided by Microsoft. It helps you store, organize and share a large amount of data and information with ease. Also, it allows you to access the stored information from any device, be it computer or a mobile. All you need is a web browser, such as Internet Explorer, Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. SharePoint is available in various editions, such as SharePoint Server, SharePoint Standard, SharePoint Enterprise, and SharePoint Online.

 Also Read: Best Strategies for SharePoint Server 2016, 2013 & 2007 Disaster Recovery

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), commonly known as SharePoint Server, is a portal-based program to create, manage, and share documents and web services in a collaborative manner. Its primary function is to create SharePoint Portals which include shared workspaces, applications, blogs, wikis and other documents, and enable users to access them through a web browser. In many enterprises, SharePoint Server is used as a content management system (CMS). The integrated platform of SharePoint Server helps users to create customized Web-based applications and portals in Windows Server environments. If you think that everything is just good enough in SharePoint Server, then you’re somewhere wrong. Where it has numerous benefits, it has one major drawback, corruption.

Corruption in SharePoint Server 

Crash or corruption in SharePoint Server can cause great damage, and permanent data loss is the worst impact. If you confront corruption or crash in SharePoint Server, you may lose all your crucial data and information from the database. Before you can troubleshoot this corruption, you should know its root cause. There are various reasons which can cause corruption in SharePoint Server. I’m listing few common reasons below, just have a look:

 

Low RAM and/or Hard Disk Space 

SharePoint Server works really hard to keep its users happy, though it has limited resources. Sometimes users may face some serious issues if the SharePoint Server has low RAM and/or hard disk space. If the SharePoint has low RAM or hard disk space, it’ll start closing all the functionalities so it can fit into the available space. Also, it’ll cache less in the web application pools and recycle them more often. Such actions of less caching and more recycling result in degraded end-user experience and troubles in SharePoint Server.

 

Improper Use of Virtualization 

If you’re using virtualization, make sure you use that smartly and correctly. Sometimes improper virtualization may cause serious issues in SharePoint Server. Just because of improper virtualization, administrators make mistakes at a high level. If you’re using virtualized SQL Server, sometimes virtualization can start over-committing the host through RAM, CPU, or hard disk space. Such an action can slow the SQL Server and that’ll also slow down the SharePoint Server.

 

Use of Incorrect URLs 

SharePoint and Microsoft Internet Information Services (ISS) generally face communication problems. If you make any changes to the web app, SharePoint doesn’t inform the ISS about this change. If you create an Alternate Access Mapping (AAM) for a particular web application in Central Administration, you must add the host header for the new address into AAM. To avoid more typing, SharePoint administrators give short URLs to their web applications. The short URLs fail to route over the Internet and cause some serious problems.

 

Run Web or Service Apps in Separate App Pools 

The web apps and other service applications are run inside an application pool. And this process is called W3WP.exe that runs on SharePoint Server. You should run all the web apps and other service applications inside one application pool. Because if you use multiple application tools, this will cache the same content multiple times. Also, running each web app in its own application pool will inefficiently use the Server’s memory. Sometimes such an action may cause serious problems.

 

Enable Default Database Settings 

If you enable the default settings of SharePoint database, it might be risky sometimes. When SharePoint Server creates multitudes of its databases, it may cause some serious problems. If you enable the Autogrowth , it’ll grow the database file size by 1 MB with every upload. As a result, this will slow down the SQL Server as well as SharePoint Server. Also, it’ll cause some serious issues on the database files.

 

Farm Configuration Wizard  

Though Farm Configuration Wizard is useful, sometimes it may create a great mess on SharePoint. How? Using the Farm Configuration Wizard improperly can cause serious problems. If you create database files by using Farm Configuration Wizard, it may give bad GUIDs aka globally unique identifiers at the end of their names. It creates a content web app at http://servername, that may fail to scale well. Also, it may create service applications which you don’t need at all.

 

Disable BLOB Caching  

BLOB caching plays a very important role in SharePoint Server. It helps SharePoint to get files to the users as quickly as possible. To improve your SharePoint performance, it’s the most effective, easiest and inexpensive way. But you’ve disabled the BLOB caching, you may face some serious issues related to SharePoint performance.

 

PDF iFilter

Most organizations use SharePoint Server to store a large number of PDF files containing crucial information. To access the information stored in PDF files, you can use SharePoint Search. If you’re not using PDF iFilter for those SharePoint Servers which run the Search Index role, it may cause serious troubles.

 

These are the most common reasons which can cause corruption in SharePoint Server and lead to data loss permanently. If you confront crash or corruption in SharePoint Server, you can troubleshoot it. After that, you can use the SharePoint Server again. But what about the data loss after corruption? If you’ve backed up your SharePoint Server database (MDF) earlier, then you can restore 100% data from it. Backup plays a role of a lifesaver at the event of data loss due to accidental deletion or corruption. But if there’s no valid backup available, it becomes a challenging task to recover SharePoint data from the corrupt database file.

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SharePoint Server Recovery Software

When you’re left with no solution, you should look forward to a professional recovery tool. SharePoint Server Recovery software is highly capable to handle different levels of corruption in SharePoint Server with Standard Recovery mode and Advanced Recovery mode. The best part of this software is that it supports Document Recovery and Complete Database Recovery. It can repair SharePoint database and restore SharePoint Server data without causing any alteration. Via this software, you can successfully restore triggers, functions, rules, lists, and documents from corrupt MDF file. Also, you can restore deleted records and advanced deleted records with ease.

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