MOSS 2007 Service Pack 2 Backup May Lock and Remove Site Actions Options

We had a very strange error suddenly appear on a client’s site last week – we got the following email:

Anyone know what's happening with site actions menu on the top level site of [the website]? I have limited menu options - i.e. there is no site actions, edit page, create page, create site, etc.

Our support team looked into this and figured out the following:

The issue appeared on the top-level site collection due it being set to “Read-Only” after a backup locked the site and then failed to release it. Changing it to “Not locked” immediately restored the menus.

This is what our guys had to say:

In SP2, Microsoft added a feature to STSADM to automatically lock the site collection during a backup:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287967(office.12).aspx

“In Service Pack 2 for SharePoint Products and Technologies, site collections are automatically locked as read-only before a backup process occurs. Therefore, there is no need to use the Setsitelock: Stsadm operation (Windows SharePoint Services) operation. If you do not want site collections to be locked as read-only, you must specify the nositelock parameter that is available in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with Service Pack 2 (SP2).”

It is likely that some kind of error or exception interrupted the scheduled backup, and as a result the lock was not removed.

Here is the page link: http://[your address]/_admin/sitequota.aspx.

Hope that helps others out!