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Yesterday I was working on a project and thought I was within that specific site when I wanted to delete it, but accidently deleted the main site of the Farm. Today I went into SPD and found that there are sub sites of the main site that are still available. Couldn't I just re-create the main site and have the sub sites pointing to the main site? There are no backups. :( BUT I did go through the database yesterday and noticed all of the lists, pages, etc. still reside there! Is this possible or is it more complicated than this?

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Do you mean you deleted the central administration site? You're gonna love this - Service Pack 1 of SP2010 has a site recycle bin, but that's not been released yet :) – James Love Jun 9 '11 at 18:02
Not the Central Admin site, thank goodness! The main site that has many sub sites, someone told me that was the farm. Yeah, I heard that yesterday, it is going to be released at the end of the month. – Richell Jun 9 '11 at 18:18
Ah right, I've deleted my post as it was completely wrong. Basically, "The Farm" represents all the servers, all the websites, all the services, all the databases and all the other accoutrements that make up SharePoint. It sounds more correct to say you've lost the "Root Web" of your Site collection. But it could also be that you've accidentally deleted the Web Application, which is just the entries in IIS (the web server) for your site, which is more easily recoverable than a lost Root Web. – James Love Jun 9 '11 at 18:32
However, if you've deleted the Root Web, there is no easy way out of this, and is the reason why backups are particularly so important in SharePoint. If you have deleted the Web Application from IIS (have a look and see if you can see it in there), I believe this is recoverable. – James Love Jun 9 '11 at 18:36
look in the IIS? How can I recover this? Hopefully we can recover this and then I will make sure we perform a FULL backup on EVERYTHING! – Richell Jun 9 '11 at 18:49
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Sounds like you deleted the top-level site collection in your web application. I believe if you delete the top-level site of a site collection, SharePoint automatically deletes the Site Collection. No - without a backup, there is now way to recover site or site collection deletions without a backup of your SQL database OR a backup of the specific site collection.

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What is interesting though is that I have the subsites still. I was advised that the top level site couldnt have been deleted unless the subsites were deleted. – Richell Jun 9 '11 at 20:35
I was thinking if I need to create (OK please help me out here as many people have given me many different terms for the SAME site, is it a Farm (I thought that was the Central Administration), is it a ROOT Web, or is it a top-level site)? I was calling it portal and someone told me Portal reffers to a subsite. I was thinking perhaps if its the site itself I can recreate the site and link the subsites back to it? Wouldn't there have to be data in the database in order for me to still bring up the sub sites? – Richell Jun 9 '11 at 20:38
Farm is all the servers, web apps, site collections, etc. Central Admin is a web application with a single site collection hosting the administrative site for SharePoint (aka Adminstrative Web). Content web applications (mapped to a virtual website in IIS) can contain a single top-level site collection at the root of the web app, and sub-site collections (e.g. /sites/<blah>. Each site collection has a top-level site, and subsites. Yes, it is bit confusing. – Chris Beckett Jun 9 '11 at 22:27
You should not be able to delete the top-level site in a site collection without deleting the entire site collection (and all sub-sites that were beneath it). Its possible something weird happened when you deleted your site that left the site collection and sub-sites intact, but I doubt it. The top-level site collection of a web application frequently hosts "The Portal", with non-root site collections hosting dept sites, etc. I suspect you deleted the top-level site collection. – Chris Beckett Jun 9 '11 at 22:30
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I continue to have a strong suspicion you are confusing sub-sites with sub-site collections. Here goes my last word on this thread: a) if the top-level site you deleted is a seperate site collection, you can just create a new one at the root of your web application - nothing else is required b) if what you say is true, then you will need to create a new site collection, then import/export your old sub-sites to the new site collection, then delete your old site collections, then backup/restore new one to right location. You cannot create a new top-level site in an existing site collection. – Chris Beckett Jun 14 '11 at 21:09
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