Hi there. I am required to do a backup and restore of a site collection that has grown to +- 400GB (DB size). What we want to do is take the data of the current site, back it up to a new web app/site collection, and gradually delete data from the current live system that exists in the restored collection.
The issue is that we cannot do a DB backup and restore, since SP does not allow 2 content db’s with the same id’s on the same farm.
Using the Backup-SPSite and Restore-SPSite commands takes forever to run, and do these without affecting the live environments, we would need to do it over a weekend. Unfortunately according to our calculations, a weekend just does not have enough hours…
Anyone with some info or options that we can use to achieve this? Your help would be greatly appreciated.
Instead of Backup-Restore command , you can take backup at SQL Level i.e. take a backup of DB in SQL Management Studio with help of DBA and then restore it with a different name.
When creating the new web application , you just need to give the name of the restored database and it will pick all the content.
For 2 content dbs with the same ID , I think you need to copy them to a separate SharePoint Form and create a new web application there (i.e. it will assign it a new GUID)
