SharePoint 2013 upgrade tip - remove deleted sites before upgrade

If you on SharePoint 2010 SP1, you will have the ability to recover deleted site collections through powershell. However, this new feature introduced issue during the upgrade. The issue is the sites that are deleted from Central Admin,are not being deleted from Content Databases immediately. This results in Test-SPContentDatabases reporting errors and orphan sites during the upgrade.

As we discussed in previous blogs, one of key to prepare SharePoint 2013 upgrade is to clean up the current SharePoint 2010 environment. One of the cleanup tasks is to delete the following site collections and sites.

• Sites cannot not be migrated to 2013 including Fab 40
• Sites without site definitions
• Sites no longer used and not need for eDiscovering or auditing
• Sites inside recycle bins
• Repair or delete orphan sites

Because the issue we mentioned above that deleted sites are not being deleted from Content Databases immediately,  here are the tips and steps to eliminate the orphan sites and Test-SpConetntDatabases errors.

1. Delete or migrate all the sites mentioned above

2. Empty recycle bins from UI, Microsoft powershell script, or custom powershell scripts

3. Force all the sites to be delete by the timer job the next time it runs through following powershell command

get-spdeletedsite -webapplication http://sharepoint | Remove-SPDeletedSite 
Get-SPDeletedSite

 

4. Run “Gradual Site Deletion” immediately to delete the sites that were marked for deletion

Of cause, you could recover the deleted if they are still in the queue using the following command.

Restore-SPDeletedSite –identity siteID

Now, you have cleaner SharePoint 2010for 2013 upgrade. Please refer to my previous blogs for other SharePoint 2010 upgrade clean up tasks.