Backup and Restore with PowerShell Command

Backup a Site collection with PowerShell command

In SharePoint 2010, PowerShell command Backup-SPSite is used for taking backup. The following command will backup the site collection ‘http://myserver’.

 

Backup-SPSite -Identity http://myserver -Path "c:\backup\file.bak"

Restore a Site Collection with PowerShell command

To restore site collection you’ll use the following command. Use –Force if you want to overwrite the existing site collection

 

Restore-SPSite -Identity http://myserver -Path "c:\backup\file.bak"

 

However, once I had restored the backup I could not access the site. The problem was that I needed to deploy the custom SharePoint solution. So in case of site collection migration (with backup/restore) from one server to another or from one site collection to another, the steps should be:

1. Restore the backup.
2. If your source site collection (from where you taken backup) uses custom SharePoint solution, then deploy the solution in the destination site collection (where you are restoring the backup). If you try to access the site without deploying solution then you may get the site non-functional.
3. Now you can try to access the site.

The important point here is that if you take backup from one server to another and restore it, the custom solution related to backup doesn’t go with backup. So after restoring backup you need to manually deploy the solution on the destination server. Then it’ll hopefully work.