Backup & Restore a SharePoint Site Collection

In this blog post I'm going to explain how to backup and restore a SharePoint site collection.

Backup a SharePoint site collection

First go to the SharePoint Central Administration 2010. Then select Backup and Restore under Central Administration. Next click on Perform a site collection backup under Granular Backup.

Then select the site collection and give the path of the folder which you wish to include your backup and a name for the backup with .bak extension. Make sure that the folder is write privileged. Select the Overwrite existing file check-box if a backup file with the same name is located in the current folder.

Then click Start Backup. Then you will get the Granular Backup Job status. Click Refresh button to confirm that the Status is 'No operation in progress'.

Then you will see the backup file has created inside the located folder.

By following these steps you can get an entire site collection backup, contains all files and settings. If you have any custom Web Pats in the site collection you need the WSP file for the restoring process.

Restore a SharePoint site collection

First go to the SharePoint Central Administration 2010 and then select Manage web applications under Application Management.

Then create a New web application and get the path of that web application.

In order to restore the backup into that web application you need the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell. Then Run as the administrator and type the following command.

restore-spsite -identity http://sp-sohani:44444/ -path C:\SPBackup\Site.bak

Then you will get a message asking the restore options, then type 'A' and press enter

Now the restoring process is over but you might not be able to access the site since the Administrator is different. In order to change the administrator, go to the SharePoint Central Administration 2010 and select Application Management. Then click on the Change site collection administrator under Site Collections.

Then select the site collection and change the Administrator.

Now you can access the site with the administrators account.