1. At a command prompt on the drive on which SharePoint Products and Technologies is installed, change to the following directory: %COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft shared\Web server extensions\12\Bin.

2. To determine the current access level of the site, type the following command, and then press ENTER:

   stsadm -o getsitelock -url <URL name>

   where URL name is the URL of the site collection that you want to back up. For more information, see Getsitelock: Stsadm operation (Office SharePoint Server).

3. If the current access level allows changes to the site content, change it to read-only by typing the following command, and then pressing ENTER:

   stsadm -o setsitelock -url <URL name> -lock readonly

   where URL name is the URL of the site collection that you want to back up. For more information, see Setsitelock: Stsadm operation (Office SharePoint Server).

4. When the backup is complete, use this procedure to return access to the site collection to the original setting determined in step 1.

A common situation where the getsitelock and setsitelock operations are useful is when a site is backed up. Typically, before you back up a site collection, the site should be locked and no users should have access to it.

To determine the lock status of the site, you can use the following getsitelock syntax:

stsadm -o getsitelock -url http://server_name

Once the lock status of the site collection is determined, you can use the noaccess parameter of the setsitelock operation to lock out all users to the site:

stsadm -o setsitelock -url http://server_name -lock noaccess

You can use the Backup operation to create a backup of the site collection:

stsadm -o backup -url http://server_name -filename "filename.bak" -overwrite

After the site has been backed up, you can use the none parameter of the setsitelock operation to remove all locks to the site:

stsadm -o setsitelock -url http://server_name -lock none