How to export SharePoint documents

Ever wonder how to export all documents from a SharePoint site? Yes, you can use the menu option "Actions" > "Open with Windows Explorer" and start copying the documents, but this method does not always work 100%, especially if there are many document libraries, many sub sites, and if the document sizes are very big.

The method I would recommend is to use SPIEFolder utility. This can be downloaded from http://spiefolder.codeplex.com

Install (extract) SPIEFolder utilities files in a directory on the SharePoint server. Once that is done, you can use the followign query to generate a DOS script to export documents from each list inside a SharePoint site.

select 'SPIEFolder.exe "http://sharepoint.ctl.creaf.com/' + w.fullURL + '" "' + l.tp_Title + '" "D:\Backup\SharePoint\' + replace(w.fullURL,'/','\') +'"'
from lists l, webs w
where l.tp_WebId=w.Id
and w.fullURL like 'sites/myDepartment%'

An example of the script output:

SPIEFolder.exe "http://sharepoint.mycompany.com/sites/myDepartment" "Shared Documents" "D:\Backup\SharePoint\sites\myDepartment"

SPIEFolder.exe "http://sharepoint.mycompany.com/sites/myDepartment" "Policies and Procedures" "D:\Backup\SharePoint\sites\myDepartment"

Here I'm exporting all contents from "Shared Documents" and "Policies and Procedures" libraries. Folders with the same name as the library names will be created in "D:\Backup\SharePoint\sites\myDepartment" on the SharePoint server.