SharePoint 2010: Restore site collection within the same farm
Introduction
We are aware that requirements can be of any form. It might be logically possible or not but when the requirements arise then clock starts ticking and task assignment counter starts!
One of our users requested a kind of strange request that he wanted the backup of one of the web applications to get restored in the same farm with different web application, we tried our level best to convince him that we can get this restored in development/stage and not understanding the logic of same replica within same farm! He seemed to get this one done so we tried researching and started taking the backup by SQL console.
Backup completed successfully and now the turn of restore keeping our fingers crossed! Let us tell you guys- you might have done so many backup-restorations across multiple farms but this seems to be unique.
Issue
Why unique? Because you are restoring that backup within the same farm.
As soon as I hit the restore command-BOOM :) it failed!
Resolution
Please refer this TechNet thread- http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sharepoint/en-US/e61ddaad-e00d-42f7-8365-728e0b224811/how-to-restore-existing-sharepoint-site-collection-on-same-farm?forum=sharepointadminlegacy
As per this reference, it is not possible to create a duplicate site collection using Content Database backup method. This is because when you restore the content database backup on another empty database the site collection ID remains the same.
Because of this, even if you add the new restored content database both the content databases will have the same site collection ID and that is the reason why the central admin shows only one site collection.
Pretty straight forward to understand and the only possible way to accomplish this requirement are either by PowerShell or by stsadm.
Step–by-step details
- Create a web application the generic way either by central administration or by PowerShell
- By this way a new database will be created which has an altogether different ID
- Take the backup of the main web application that you want to restore on new one by using PowerShell command: Backup-SPSite -Identity “http://mossnwss.com” -Path "E:\Backup\amar.bak"
- Restore the backup on to the web application that you have created in the step#1
If you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned information then please leave a comment.