I've seen many questions lately about how to restore an accidentally deleted file from a SharePoint Document Library. Although this becomes much less of an issue with the SharePoint 2007 Recycle Bin, it's not as easy to do with SharePoint 2003.
Since we do a database backup every night, the best way that I've found to restore a single file, or a small set of files is to use the SharePoint Database Explorer from James Edelen, which can be found here: http://mindsharpblogs.com/james/archive/2005/01/20/189.aspx
We take the nightly backup for the day that the restore has been requested from, and restore the database to any database server. You can then crack open the restored database with the SharePoint Database Explorer and quickly navigate to the file(s) that need to be restored. From there you can choose to save the original file back to a file system or even save the document versions out to the file system. Once you have your files, you can just put them back into SharePoint where they should be.
The nice thing with this strategy is that we are using the same backups that we are creating every night as well as not having to bring the site back up into a working SharePoint environment. The only limitation we see is not being able to restore list items.
However, remember to only use this utility against a backup of your database, never use it on a production database!
Thanks James for such an excellent but simple tool!
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gruz