Saving a Site as a Template: ‘Failure decompressing data from a cabinet file’ Error Workaround

I was trying to save a site as a template today including the content, and I got the error ‘Failure decompressing data from a cabinet file’.

I found a workaround on Ragav Jagannathan’s site: http://ragavj.blogspot.com/2008/02/failure-decompressing-data-from-cabinet.html

…This error "Failure decompressing data from a cabinet file" can be avoided by using the stsadm command line tool of MOSS 2007 and using the "nofilecompression" attribute.For example to export a site template, you would use something like this:

• stsadm.exe -o export -url http://intranet/test -includeusersecurity -nofilecompression -filename C:\backup

Once you finish your export use the stsadm import command with the same nofilecompression attribute. For example:

• stsadm.exe -o import -url http://intranet/test -includeusersecurity -nofilecompression -filename C:\backup

Alternatively, you can change the maximum size allowed for a template file:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.administration.spwebservice.maxtemplatedocumentsize.aspx
• http://suguk.org/forums/thread/9505.aspx

The standard template size (by default) is set to a max of 10Mb, so it could be failing on this. The following STSADM command allows you to set the template size to approx. 150Mb, though I’ve never tried a template quite that large before! I believe the max is 500Mb. Good luck.

stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname max-template-document-size -propertyvalue 151200000