Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Restoring PORTAL site collection from one farm to another

When you backup portal site collection from Farm1 and try to restore it  not as a portal site collection on Farm2,  but as  a site collection within a managed path, I'm afraid it not possible.

Even after several tries to do it, all I was getting was overwritten portal site collection on the farm that I tried to restore it to. So before you attempt to restore PORTAL Site Coll. into managed path Site Coll. be careful as this action most likely will overwrite your existing Portal Site collection.

And if you found a way to do it without overwriting  Portal Site Collection on the existing farm, leave a comment and let me know how.

Thanks

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

This happen to me quite frequently. The only way I got it to work was to stop IIS [net stop IISAdmin/y ] restore the site; start it back [net start w3svc]; works everytime; pain in the butt; but it works! TimWill

Anonymous said...

I have just copied that site collection over manually using SPD. I would then do an export/import with each WSS tree branch, restoring it underneath a blank site created on the destination portal.

Unknown said...

Do you try this ?

stsadm -o backup -url SERVEUR_A -filename FILEPATH –overwrite

stsadm -o restore -url SERVEUR_B -filename FILEPATH -overwrite

But perhaps i'm naïve ;)

Anonymous said...

and you ccannot use Import export, instead 0f backup -restore

Unknown said...

"Import export" works for a site not for web collection

Natalya Voskresenskaya [SharePoint MVP] said...

Ok, SPD's import export is not an option quite often. Though I’m favoring SPD, but not in this case. The method I was talking about was export/import through stsadm. I should try backup restore perhaps, but sometimes you don’t want to bring it ALL from one farm to another which backup and restore will do (security,…). But let's see if this can be a workaround.

Anonymous said...

I'd be interested to see your stsadm -o import/export scripts.
Also, by PORTAL site collection do you mean site within SiteDirectory?
The way I see it there is no PORTAL site collection other than portal itself. If you want to create another site collection I'd go to Central Admin and create it under managed paths. Everything within a Portal would be just a site.

Anonymous said...

Vlad is correct, there can only be one "Portal" per web application (notice how you cannot create another Portal beneath your Parent Portal, the template just isn't there.)
You can stsadm restore no problem, you can enumsites and it will list your restored portal. You can manage it through central admin but you just cannot navigate to it other than through web dav.
Sorry folks but beyond this point is the dark side and that means no support.
Mike