Exporting and importing sites from one server to another

Question

Good morning, I have taken over the existing SharePoint operations for my company, but have had little to no experience. I was hoping to get some assistance on migrating two sites from an old SharePoint server to a new one, including all content, permissions, etc. Essentially I am looking for the end user to not notice any difference, except for the site's web address.

1) OldServer, OS: 2008 R2, SharePoint 2010 Foundation 14.0.7015.1000

• Site1
• Site2

2) NewServer, OS: 2008 R2, SharePoint 2010 Foundation 14.0.7015.1000

• Many existing content databases and sites

tried Exporting a Site:

On OldServer, in SharePoint Central Admin GUI > Backup and Restore > Granular Backup > Export a site or list. I then went into Powershell (not very familiar with) and successfully used "Restore-SPSite -Identity [OldServer/OldSite] -Path [Backup location]. This worked without error, but it only brought over some lists, but no data.

Next,

I performed a Site Collection backup on the OldServer using SharePoint Central Admin GUI > Backup and Restore > Perform a site collection backup. This backup file was considerably smaller than what I thought would be (only a few hundred K).

Then, 

I performed a SP Site Backup using Powershell: backup-spsite -identity [http://OldServer/sites/oldsite] -path "c:\backups\oldsite.bak" and that produced a .bak file that I would estimate is much closer to the size of the data.

So, I went into the new server, went into Powershell and tried restore-spsite, but I am not sure how to feed it into the correct database. I use Restore-SPSite but I keep getting errors. 

First I was not sure if i need to create an existing site and import/overwrite? I assume that if I select the root, it will completely overwrite existing data.

Second, when i input the -DatabaseServer and -DatabaseName parameters, and after I created a new Site, I receive the error "the sql server does not exist in the farm" - I did doublecheck I typed in the Server and DBName correctly.

Thank you for your help, in advance!

Andy

Answer 1

make sure log and backup file copied over to destination server. Create a new site if necessary or select a site which will be overwritten:

Restore-SPSite http://yoursiteaddress -Path "FileLocation" -Force

Hope this helps

Answer 2

Hi Andy,

You can create multiple new site collections with different databases and then migrate the contents from the original site collection to the new site collection. You can do this follow below steps:

1. Create new site collections with the specified databases  using powershell.

https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/167050/create-new-site-collection-with-new-content-database-using-powershell

2. Export the site content from the source site collection using either Powershell or Stsadm Export command.

3. Import the site content to the destination site collection using either Powershell or Stsadm Export command.

In addition, I think below articles are useful to you:

https://serverfault.com/questions/90728/best-method-to-transfer-a-sharepoint-site-from-one-sp-install-to-another

https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/52780/how-to-copy-site-collection-to-another-server

Best regards,

Allen Bai

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Answer 3

Thank you Allen, I will take a look!

Answer 4

Hi Andy,

How are things going?

If you think my suggestion is helpful, you could mark it as an answer. It will help others who meet the similar question in this forum.

Best regards,

Allen Bai 

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