Just thought I will share my pain and some information that
might safe guard you from making the same mistake as I did.
Problem:
User called up saying the list view has reached its
threshold. The list was an Issues Register (name: Cut-Over Issues Register) and
had versioning enabled. User requested we make a copy of list and name it
“Issues Register” and delete all the closed items so only the Open items would
remain in the new “Issues Register”
Solution:
Follow the technet article
which uses PowerShell to export the list and then import the list back in. I
found out this is not as easy as it looks in fact it was very hard and
extremely painful, mainly due to the fact that the command does not cater for
users that do not exist in AD anymore.
Why:
Well the list had versioning enabled and the worst part was
that some of the users that had created an item have left NTG, which means the
user account did not exist. So the restore process had overwritten the users
that it could not find in AD with my user id and obviously that meant that we
had lost the history.
Oh no… What can I do, unfortunately this is by design and
the solution found on some forum sites was to reactivate those accounts in AD,
copy the list and deactivate them again (not really an option if you have many
users)
Things to do or look out for:
This exercise has highlighted some very important points:
·
If versioning is enabled on a list then do not copy/move.
Suggest we create a new list based on the existing list definition and archive
existing list by setting the list permission to read-only.
·
It can very difficult to recover your changes as
even if you had a backup of the DB and thought you can just restore the list,
you will not be able to do so. All the users that do not exist will be replaced
with your user id, so in a sense you will never be able to recover an original
list
·
If you get a request for a copy of a list,
ensure there is no versioning enabled (List settings > versioning), if there
is versioning then inform the requestor that they might lose historical info
i.e. if any of the uses who modified/created an item and have left the
organization then this will be replaced with your userid.
How to best solve the list view threshold issue (my
recommendation):
·
Navigate to the list, then list settings, click
on save as list template and specify a name (do not include content as most
likely it will exceed the allowed file size of 500MB)
·
Create a new list based on the new template that
you have created.
·
Archive the original list by setting the
permission of the original list to read only.
·
This will need some planning before it carried
out, as you may find that it may work in dev/uat but in PROD it won’t because
of minimal testing carried out prior to moving your changes to PROD.
