Just had to do a restore of our Sharepoint server. Someone had deleted a load of resources from our room bookings site, but also deleted from the Recycle Bin.
We use Symantec Backup Exec 12 with the Sharepoint agents installed. Took a backup of the current state of the server (after all, it does work, just missing some information). The restore failed. Various errors all surrounding the restore of the SSP.
When checking the Sharepoint Central Administration, the SharedServices1 had a status of Unprovisioning. From our testing before Sharepoint went into production, I knew that I could force the deletion of the SSP and then restore from backup again (and from experience this is generally more successful than restoring over the existing SSP).
First attempt is to run the following command line:
stsadm -o deletessp -title SharedServices1 -force
This failed though, and referenced the log files for further details. In the log files, the following line was logged.
Could not clean up shared service database. Details: Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPUpdatedConcurrencyException: An update conflict has occurred, and you must re-try this action. The object SharedResourceProvider Name=SharedServices1 Parent=SPFarm Name=SharePoint_Config is being updated by DOMAIN\backupuseraccount, in the STSADM process, on machine SERVERNAME. View the tracing log for more information about the conflict.
A stack trace is then shown afterwards (information overload if I put the whole lot in here). Again, seen this error before when dealing with Alternate Access Mappings. This was fixed using the Microsoft KB below.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939308
Although the symptoms do not describe anything to do with SSP, following this solution fixed it for me. I was then able to run the stsadm command above, and my SSP was deleted.
Re-ran the restore from Symantec Backup Exec, but this time only selected the SSP components. This time the restore completed. SSP restored, MySites working and a fully functioning search.
