Can’t perform an item level restore on a SharePoint 2010 farm

I’m teaching at CornerStone this week and running DPM in a lab environment. This can give you more insight in the problem solving scenarios since you always run into different interesting possibilities to solve problems.

After protecting a SharePoint 2010 farm I couldn’t perform an item level restore. Everything looked good in the console but double-clicking the content database didn’t populate any items to restore.

Since DPM must run the cataloguing function of the SharePoint content database you can be stranded up to 24h before you can preform an item level restore.

If you don’t want to wait 24h do this in the DPM2010 server DPM PowerShell:

Get-ProtectionGroup yourdpmservername | get-datasource | where-object {$_.type -like "*sharepoint*"} | start-createcatalog

Close your console and start it up again, problem solved.