R – FBA based SharePoint Application Backup restore

forms-authenticationsharepoint

Has anyone tried to back up a SharePoint web application using forms based authentication (FBA) to another SharePoint server?

We are facing some issues in backup\restore of FBA based sharepoint web applications:

  1. We have a server where we have created a web application based on FBA, it has an FBA database as well.
  2. We have backed up the FBA database to the new server.
  3. We tried to backup the web application and restore it to a new server.
  4. We changed the authentication settings and made web.config entries for FBA.
  5. When accessing the site, I was able to login to the site and see all the content. But when I use this function in the object model it always returns false no matter which user I logged in to:

SPContext.Current.Web.DoesUserHavePermissions(
    SPContext.Current.Web.RoleDefinitions["Read "].BasePermissions).ToString()

Has anyone faced issues like this before?

Has anyone tried to back up an FBA based Web Application?

We did the restore to a different farm that resides in a different domain – will this have any effect?

Best Answer

I have managed to successfully backup and restore both the database and SharePoint web application for an FBA-enabled SharePoint application.

The steps you've listed seem correct to me but are you sure that you've completed them correctly?

Particularly step 5: you need to ensure that you've correctly changed settings for the Central Administration site and your web applications configuration settings (web.config settings and extending the application to a new zone and enabling FBA). Double check that you've configured everything as per the original application.

Another thing to check is that you've custom role definition "Admin" actually exists. I assume it does and should have been backed up/restored successfully, but it's worth checking.

One thing that I did differently was to move the content database (instead of backup/restore through Central Administration or STSADM). I don't think this should make any difference, but it worked for me.

Related Topic