Useful MSDN resource: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607925(v=office.15).aspx
I just learned what's the identity of a site. At least according to what Restore-SPDeletedSite knows.
But which one of these is the site's identity? Sometimes, or a lot of times depending on how new your are to SharePoint, the terminology that is used is confusing. Anyways after a few tries someone realized that they can use the site Path as the identity while invoking the Restore-SPDeletedSite PowerShell command.
I just learned what's the identity of a site. At least according to what Restore-SPDeletedSite knows.
This PowerShell SharePoint command is the only way to restore a deleted site collection. In SharePoint 2013 there is no UI in central administration, or even SharePoint designer as far as I have searched that allows you to do this.
To get the list of Site Collections that were deleted and are restorable, use the Get-SPDeletedSite command that will return SPDeletedSite objects.
For example (on a test server, hence http not https) gets you the following information:
WebApplicationId : 9fa68842-c64d-493b-8102-15d4929d2fb6
DatabaseId : dcacbbf9-719b-41b7-b7f9-526bce8100ff
SiteSubscriptionId : 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000
SiteId : b1110b1f-822b-4d70-aace-09dcba30aeca
Path : /sites/test3
Scheme : Http
Url : http://mysharepoint/sites/test3
DeletionTime : 8/6/2014 8:05:41 AM
But which one of these is the site's identity? Sometimes, or a lot of times depending on how new your are to SharePoint, the terminology that is used is confusing. Anyways after a few tries someone realized that they can use the site Path as the identity while invoking the Restore-SPDeletedSite PowerShell command.
Don't forget the preceding forward-slash (/). Using sites/test3 will not work in this example.
Restore-SPDeletedSite -Identity /sites/test3