Restore after Cumulative Update

Question

I need to do a cumulative update on a 2019 farm.

I have done the update in our dev farm, which went well, but I thought I would test rolling it back, so I did a restore from the farm backup I made before the update. The restore used the 'Same configuration' option and went ok but it did not restore the farm to the previous version. I thought of running the configuration wizard to reset it, but that wouldn't work because the update is still installed on the server. I suppose I could uninstall the update then try running the configuration wizard, but I'm not sure how to do that because the update does not appear in Add or Remove Programs.

I am somewhat puzzled by this as I understand that a restore is the only option if an update fails and can't be fixed.

Answer 1

You can't roll back a cumulative update in SharePoint.

I think that snapshots are the only thing that would actually work, but they're not supported, hence you would end up in an unsupported state.

The only supported way would be to create a new farm using the database backups from before the patch(es) were applied to them.

Answer 2

I generally create a recovery point before patching. You should be able to power off SharePoint Farm servers to ensure there are no transactions in flight. Perform clone of farm servers. While servers are powered off, perform DB backup of SharePoint databases if they are hosted on a separate server. At this point, you would power on servers, validate functionality, then apply your CU.

If a restore is needed, you would need to restore the web\app server backups as well as the DB backup in order to return to the previous state prior to applying the cumulative update.

Reverting to the backups is a last resort/safety net. You should be able to perform a search on any error received from the log output generated by your product configuration wizard and get pretty good results to correct and rerun wizard to complete patch. After the update is applied, perform basic functionality test.

Answer 3

It's not recommended to roll back a SharePoint update, as it can cause issues with the farm configuration and data. However, if you need to uninstall the update, you can do so using PowerShell. Here are the steps:

1. Open the SharePoint Management Shell as an administrator.

2. Run the following command to get the installed updates on the server:

   Get-Hotfix -Id KBXXXXXXX

   Replace "KBXXXXXXX" with the KB number of the SharePoint update you want to uninstall.

3. Run the following command to uninstall the update:

   Uninstall-SPSolution -Identity <SolutionName>

   Replace "" with the name of the solution that contains the update. You can get the solution name by running the following command:

   Get-SPSolution

4. After the update is uninstalled, run the SharePoint Configuration Wizard to reset the farm configuration.

   Note: Before running the Configuration Wizard, make sure that you have a backup of the farm configuration and data.

   You can run the Configuration Wizard by using the following command:

   psconfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -force

   This command will upgrade the farm to the latest version and reset the configuration.

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.