Restoring sharepoint questions...

[llawwehttam]

Hi folks.

 

Last week we backed up our full sharepoint farm using the built in backup and restore feature.

We were planning on restoring the farm to a virtual machine but it's currently failing. The cause is that the new virtualised server has a different name to the old server and we can't use the old name.

 

So currently we're stuck with the sharepoint farm backup and we would like to get it up and running ASAP. Is it possible to restore the entire farm to the new VM (with a different name/IP to the old server) or is this going to be the stuff of nightmares?

 

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[llawwehttam]

Well I managed to get it working in the end.

 

I tried multiple methods with no sucess and had lots of problems along the way but here's what ended up working:

 

#1 Creating a new sharepoint site with the same DB name etc...

#2 Using the restore feature to restore the content DB and the site settings with new names.

#3 Manually replacing the new DB + site with the restored one.

#4 A bit of stsadm magic with liberal use of overwrite.

#5 Some manual work in sql management studio and text editors.

#6 Manually fixing permissions

#7 Restarting IIS

 

Many incantations and a lot of voodoo was used in the process but it seems to have done the trick. The errors generated by the backup and restore feature were less than useful.