We received a sharepoint backup file as part of a project. Is there any way to access the ".dat" file without Sharepoint?
I've heard that some of the files created with SharePoint are .cab files, but apparently not this one.
I hadn't heard of Sharepoint until yesterday, but there were 77 pages of unclosed questions about it on here so I'm assuming it's okay to ask (even though it doesn't seem very programmerish to me)
The .dat file is similar or equal to a MS SQL backup file, you really have no much use for it without the server software installed. If you expect to extract pages, images etc, keep in mind everything is serialized into the SQL Server database, so pretty much only browsable on sharepoint itself.
SharePoint is very programmy :)
There are a few ways of creating backup files for SharePoint. There is the SQL backup but also the stsadm -o export and stsadm -o backup commands. Only the stsadm -o export command yields a cab but whats inside is not very usable I'm afraid. What would you need to get out of that backup?
If 'someone' gave you that they should really have told you what it is!
You can always ask someone with a running instance of SharePoint to restore it in their environment and pull out any documents you might need.
The base variety of SharePoint (WSS) is a free install. You can install an eval version of the full SharePoint product (MOSS). I think MS even has pre installed virtual machines you can download.