SPS Portal restore to new Farm..

Hello - i'm hoping someone can help with this problem.

We are replicating our sharepoint infrastructure onto 2 new farms (the
company is demergin so we need to create 2 new environments for
everything we have!).

Currently we have 2 farms that either host sharepoint sites for
internal users (e.g. company intranet) or external users (e.g.
collaboration sites). The Farms are setup as:

2 x Web Servers (WSS 2.0 & SPS 2003)
1 x Job & Index Server (WSS 2.0 & SPS 2003)
1 x SQL Server (SQL Server 2000).

The 2 new companies will have 1 Farm with all the sites consolidated
into it. Don't ask why there are 2 farms currently - it was
inherited!

Anyway, i am using the SPS Backup and Restore Utility to backup
portals and restore. Everything works as expected for Portals backed
up from the internal farm but not for the external farm.

On restoring a portal we receive the following errors:

In SPS Backup & Restore Utility following message is displayed,
usually about 35% through the restore: "Error: The site database
specified is already in use by another component of the farm". The
popup box also says to consult the database servers event log.

The SQL Server eventlog has the following entry: "Recovery is
checkpointing database 'Projects1_SITE'."

The SQL Activity logs has an entry that says: "Bypassing recovery for
database 'Projects1_SITE' because it is marked IN LOAD." Followed by:
"Recovery is checkpointing database 'Projects_SITE' (18)"

I have seen posts that say to do the restore with the NORECOVERY
switch but i don't see where to specify that using the SPS Backup &
Restore Utility.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Oli.

richard
Fri May 02 12:17:30 CDT 2008

On May 2, 9:07 am, oliver_bro...@hotmail.com wrote:
> Hello - i'm hoping someone can help with this problem.
>
> We are replicating our sharepoint infrastructure onto 2 new farms (the
> company is demergin so we need to create 2 new environments for
> everything we have!).
>
> Currently we have 2 farms that either host sharepoint sites for
> internal users (e.g. company intranet) or external users (e.g.
> collaboration sites). The Farms are setup as:
>
> 2 x Web Servers (WSS 2.0 & SPS 2003)
> 1 x Job & Index Server (WSS 2.0 & SPS 2003)
> 1 x SQL Server (SQL Server 2000).
>
> The 2 new companies will have 1 Farm with all the sites consolidated
> into it. Don't ask why there are 2 farms currently - it was
> inherited!
>
> Anyway, i am using the SPS Backup and Restore Utility to backup
> portals and restore. Everything works as expected for Portals backed
> up from the internal farm but not for the external farm.
>
> On restoring a portal we receive the following errors:
>
> In SPS Backup & Restore Utility following message is displayed,
> usually about 35% through the restore: "Error: The site database
> specified is already in use by another component of the farm". The
> popup box also says to consult the database servers event log.
>
> The SQL Server eventlog has the following entry: "Recovery is
> checkpointing database 'Projects1_SITE'."
>
> The SQL Activity logs has an entry that says: "Bypassing recovery for
> database 'Projects1_SITE' because it is marked IN LOAD." Followed by:
> "Recovery is checkpointing database 'Projects_SITE' (18)"
>
> I have seen posts that say to do the restore with the NORECOVERY
> switch but i don't see where to specify that using the SPS Backup &
> Restore Utility.
>
> Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Oli.

I always found the built in backup/restore tool to be very limited,
especially when restoring to different environments.

My recommendation would be to backup the databases using SQL directly,
and then restore them to the new environment. In the new environment
you can then use Create New Portal > Restore Portal (I can't remember
exactly what it's called in Central Admin, but you should be able to
find it) which will allow you to specify the restored databases.

Richard