So I woke up this morning finding one of our SharePoint 2013 sites in read-only mode. When I browsed the site I got the following message: “We apologize for any inconvenience, but we've made the site read only while we're making some improvements.”
On further investigation I noticed that the nightly backup of this specific site collection did not complete successfully”. When you backup a Site, SharePoint places the site in read-only mode. But since my backup hanged the site never got out the read-only mode.
When you check the site in the Site Collection Quota and Locks Screen you’ll find all options greyed out:
I checked the SPSite.MaintenanceMode setting and it was set to true.
So I first turned to PowerShelll trying to set the lockstate to unlocked. And although I did not get an error, the site was still locked. So I tried good old STSADM. Operation completed successfully but still LOCKED.
Luckily since the April 2013 CU update for SharePoint 2013 we now have the SpsiteAdministration.ClearMaintenanceMode method. So we can clear the flag with the flowing two lines:
$site = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPSiteAdministration('http://intranet.demo.local’)
$site.ClearMaintenanceMode()
and your site is out of maintance mode again!
