SharePoint Backup and Restore : Moving content across environments

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If you thought that moving content from one environment to the other using SharePoint backup and restore was as simple as the click of a button, then read this blog to understand why it is not.

Due to the differences in the "environmental factors' , additional steps might be necessary to ensure that the restore process succeeds.There is a nice article in MSDN that talks about how to troubleshoot backup and restore issues. Typically you would need to investigate the log files to figure out why any particular operation failed.

Known issue: Search indexes cannot be restored using this approach. A full crawl is required after the entire restore process to rebuild them again.

Keep the following points in mind while planning for a backup and restore activity,-

  1. SharePoint restore always creates a fresh new database. Hence delete the old content databases before moving ahead with the restore operation.
  2. Delete the SSP before restoring the same.
  3. Ensure that the various service accounts have necessary permissions on the UNC path & SQL Server
  4. Ensure that there is sufficient disk space on the database drives.

Update - 8/8/2008
I just came across another blog by Stefan Gobner where he mentions about additional known issues with this operation. Read here for more details.