User Profile Synchronization Service failed to start..can be fixed

if you want to do a User profile import in SharePoint 2010.. you should have the
'User Profile Synchronization Service' started. But there are many reason why this
service wont start. Following are some points to check before doing something crazy
like re-install the farm.

How to back up a User Profile Service application using SQL Server in SharePoint 2010 ?

• Open SQL Server Management Studio
• Connect to the database server.
• Expand Databases.
• Right-click the database that you want to back up, point to Tasks
• Then click Back Up.
• In the Back up Database dialog box,
• In the Source area, select the backup type that you want to perform
• User Profile Service application always requires a full backup, so select Full backup
• In the Backup component area, click Database.
• Provide the name to the backup
• We can set an expiration date to make this back up available till desired date.
• By default its 0, means no expiration date
• Provide the path where you want to store this back up under Destination
• That’s it we are done with user profile backup

A very good article available @ http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg576965

MOSS 2007 User Profile AD Sync Issue

Background:

• User Profile Import Schedule was not running as per configured Schedules
• We have to manually run the Incremental crawl which pulled the users from different ADs.
• Profile Synchronization, Quick Profile Synchronization Jobs were running successfully.
• There were totally 90000 profiles, pulled from different domains.

Problem:

• Imported User profile details (changes) were not getting published to the web applications.
• We were able to see the changes in SSP database in “UserProfileValue“table.
• On the other hand when we removed the user from site and added him back the changes are reflected in the web application.

Resolution:
Ran following commands to get rid of this issue
stsadm -o sync -listolddatabases
Resulted in number of GUIDs, so ran following command to delete those GUIDs
stsadm -o sync -deleteolddatabases
And then
stsadm -o sync
To check connection between AD and MOSS ran following command
stsadm -o getproperty -propertyname peoplepicker-searchadforests
If its resulted in NO, then we have to set connection between AD and MOSS using following command
stsadm –o setproperty –pn peoplepicker-searchadforests –pv

After that rechecked behavior using stsadm -o sync -listolddatabases and did not get any GUIDs and after that ran Full import which resolved the issues.

Please let me know in case of any questions.