Someone needed to move a Document Library from one site collection to another one.  The only viable way to do this is to go to the library settings for that doc library and export it as a list template with content.  When I did that I received the in-SharePoint error saying:

“The list is too large to save as a template. The size of a template cannot exceed 10485760 bytes.” 

This poses a problem because the only other (non third-party tool) way to do this would involve exporting a copy of the original site and then importing it into the destination site collection so that I would be able to use Site Manager to move the list.

Well it turns out there is an undocumented property that can be modified to change this.  Run the following command to see what your farm is currently set to:

stsadm.exe –o getproperty -propertyname max-template-document-size

Chances are the reply will be “<Property Exist=No" />”, which means that you are using the default setting of 10 MB as your limit.  You can set the limit to something higher by using the “setproperty” switch.  For example:

stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname max-template-document-size –propertyvalue 500000000

would increase the limit to about 60 MB.

In my case this was really a one-time thing so, after I had created the copy of the document library, I set the size back to the original 10485760 byte value.

Out of the box, MOSS is set to run the profile sync timer job once every hour.  So I ran the following command to show me which content DBs haven’t been synced in the last day:

stsadm.exe -o sync -listolddatabases 1

On my vpc, it looks like this:

This looks helpful except for the fact that nobody knows what the GUID of their content DBs are.  On the client farm there some DBs with very old dates and I could tell something was wrong.  I needed to figure out what the names of the DBs with the old GUIDs are.  The easiest way to do that is to browse to Central Administration and mouse-over your content DBs.  Then you can eyeball the DB GUIDs in the status bar of your browser as it shows you the URL of the hyperlink.  It looks like this:

The GUID of the content DB you are pointing to starts after the “DatabaseID=%7B” in your status bar. Also take note that the “%2D” in the status bar refers to the hyphen character.  Now you know the GUID of that SharePoint Content Database.

I tried going back to the command-line to use stsadm to force it to sync.  To do that I just typed in:

stsadm.exe –o sync

I waited a while and even checked the timer job status in Central Admin and waited for it to say the Profile Sync job had completed successfully.  It turns out that this sync command only forces the “quick” version which does not go through the same job that that is scheduled for every hour.  I was disappointed to see that my content database did not get updated so now I used stsadm to wipe out my profile sync info for the databases with old data.  The following command will delete the profile sync data for databases that haven’t been synced in the last day:

stsadm.exe –o sync –deleteolddatabases

I was feeling good about myself at this point but after double-checking my work I learned that it STILL had not synced.  There was no getting around it, I had to look at the ULS logs.  When I poked around I found a line that kept showing up that alarmed me.  Referring to “SharePoint Portal Server User Profiles” the description portion of the error said something like “Aborting sweepsynch for guid instance {SomeGUID} due to null or non-online content database”.

This sounded familiar to me because I knew we had left some content databases in “offline” mode to prevent them from getting new site collections created in them (they’re already too big).  So when I looked back in Central Administration to see which databases were offline, it turned out to be every one of the ones that weren’t syncing the profiles.

This isn’t documented anywhere but it looks like content databases that are marked as “offline” in central administration will not get synced with profile sync jobs.  Once I turned them all back to “ready”, I had a very looooong running profile sync job after that and it was all clear from there on out.