Backup/Restore of a sharepoint site using stsadm

Backup means taking copy of a sharepoint site and restore means paste to another.

There are two ways of doing this or we can say that two set of commands.

• Backup - Restore
• Import - Export

Both ways are having their own advantage and disadvantages.

In this article I will show you Backup and restore command.

To achieve this we will use STSADM utility. This utility is present in the below mentioned path.

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN

I have created two web application. One is with some customization and other is blank site.

Website 1: Site with some customization having address http://spdevserver:1002/default.aspx

WebSite 2: Blank site having address http://spdevserver:1003/default.aspx

Now we will take the backup from http://spdevserver:1002/default.aspx and restore it to http://spdevserver:1003/default.aspx

Steps to take site Backup:

Step 1: Open Command prompt and go to location as shown in the below screenshot.

Step 2: Write the STSADM command for taking the site backup.

stsadm -o backup -url http://spdevserver:1002/ -filename C:\Backup.bak

This command will save Backup.bak file in C:\

This file is the complete backup for http://spdevserver:1002/default.aspx

Now next step is to Restore this backup file to http://spdevserver:1003/default.aspx

To do this we need to write the STSADM command for Restore.

RESTORE COMMAND

stsadm -o restore -url http://spdevserver:1003/ -filename C:\Backup.bak -overwrite

Now after completing this operation we are having http://spdevserver:1003/default.aspx site which is exactly the replica of http://spdevserver:1002/default.aspx site.

Just refresh the page and you will see it.

In this way we can take a backup of sharepoint site and restore it to another sharepoint site.