Tech Tied

My experience with Stsadm.exe is migrating Sharepoint 3.0 sites from one server to another. We were using Sharepoint 3.0 on a test server and we setup Sharepoint 3.0 and MOSS 2007 on another server. We needed to migrate existing data onto the new server.

**Very important. You need to be a farm administrator on both servers to have the specific permissions to complete the migration. If you are unsure do the migration while logged into the Administrator account. In my case i thought i had the right permissions but i didn’t. Stsadm.exe didn’t prompt why it couldn’t complete the migration, it just failed.

STSADM.EXE is already on your server located here:
%PROGRAMFILES%\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin.

1. Login to the server that had the files that you need to copy
2. Create a directory on your hard drive named “spbackup” on a drive that has enough storage space for the backup files.
3. Go to the startmenu, clicking RUN, then type in CMD.
4. In the command prompt window opens type “cd \” to bring you to the root of C:
5. Type in the following “cd C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN”
6. This next command will start the backup of your sites, so be prepaired it may take a few minites depending on the size of our site.

Type the following in the command prompt:

stsadm.exe -o export -url http://(Your Site) -includeusersecurity -nofilecompression -filename d:\spbackup

Please Note:

• I put in the command -nofilecompression becuase when i used file compression the backup failed, using this switch completed the backup with no errors.
• Use HTTP or HTTPS depending on your setup
• Replace the drive letter for where ever you created spbackup

Now hopefully the backup finished successfully. Your next step will be moving the spbackup folder onto the new server.

After you have moved the spbackup folder onto the new server login to the new server and repeat steps 3-6. Then when you are ready type in the following command to import the sites onto the new Sharepoint site.

stsadm.exe -o import -url https://(Your Site) -includeusersecurity -nofilecompression -filename d:\spbackup

I hope that that your import completed successfully. If you have any questions please leave a comment on this post and I will do my best to help.

- Kevin C -

- Update 6-13-07 -

I forgot an important factor while you are migrating your SharePoint Sites. You may receive an error about something like “Missing WebTemplate” or something of that nature. If you do the reason for this is because you had added an Application Template on your site and it does not exist on the new site you are trying to migrate to. This is a simple error to fix. All you need to do is add the Application Template to the new site and then try to do the migration again. Please refer to the following link to the Microsoft page explaining how to import templates onto your SharePoint site. Click Here

- Kevin Clark -