Yesterday I managed to seriously break our production SharePoint 2007 site (WSS3.0 on SBS2008) site by inadvertently saving a word document over the AllItems.aspx file.
This is an incredibly easy thing to do by pasting the URL of a SharePoint folder location from the browser, there is the is the mistake (if taken from a Windows Explorer would be okay) into the Save As control e.g.
Copying https://sharepoint.fqdn.com:PortNNN/General%20Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx?RootFolder=%2fGeneral%20Documents%2fFoldrer1%2fFolde2%2fFolder3 out of the IE address bar to paste into the Save As File name entry in hope that it would then enumerate the target folder..
Anyway, clearly its the wrong thing to do and in this case replaced the Allitems.aspx with a word document, this broke the browser view of all SharePoint pages on the site collection although using Windows Explorer to access SharePoint folders continued to work okay.
Our resident SharePoint expert and Development Director (Chris Hermon) used SPD 2007 to try and replace/restore the Allitems.apsx but whilst this initially appeared to resolve the issue, the basic SharePoint object controls were still broken such as not having the drop down available e.g.
We took a view on this and decided to perform an stsadm restore from the last content dB backup. This was a relatively straightforward decision for us as we knew and had made copies of documents changed since the last backup (daily), however in a busier enviornment this would not be so easy.
Restoring the stsadm backup resolved the issue it’s a rather drastic resolution for a incredibly easy issue to create (and no, I was not using an Admin account or the collection administrator, just a normal author).
I’ll try the same on SP2010 and see if Microsoft have fixed this rather obvious gap in system integrity protection!