Backing up a Site Collection

Difficulty: Medium
Applies to: WSS v2

Problem Statement
You have created several Sites and Subsites in your WSS deployment in a Pilot environment. The time has come to move some of these sites to a Production server. You have access to your WSS sites as an Administrator and/or a Web Designer and you have a copy of Microsoft FrontPage 2003, but you do not have access to the Physical SharePoint server.

Solution
A Site Collection is defined as a Top Level WSS site and all Subsites underneath it. When a SharePoint administrator decides to copy or move a Site Collection, she usually uses command line tools such as stsadm.exe and smigrate.exe. However, to use these tools, access to the SharePoint server is required. If an end user with at least Web Designer privileges wishes to backup and restore a Site Collection, she would need access to Microsoft FrontPage.

To backup a Site Collection or an individual Site from your Pilot environment, first start FrontPage on your client computer. Click on File -> Open Site, then enter the address of the site on the pilot server (ex: http://pilot.wss.com/sites/site1). Click on “Open”. The Site that you wish to backup should now be displayed in FrontPage.

To backup this site, follow these steps:

1. Click on Tools -> Server -> Backup Web Site. The following dialog box appears:

Note:If you wish to backup all Subsites underneath this site, check the checkbox to indicate that.

1. Click “OK”
2. The “File Save” dialog box will appear. Save the file at any location in your client computer. Notice that the backup file that’s created has the extension .fwp

Now comes the time to restore the Site or Site Collection that you have backed up on the Production server. I’m sure you must have noticed that there is a “Restore Web Site” option right beside the “Backup Web Site” menu option. Your first thought might be that it would be easy to start FrontPage and restore the site at any location. However, the restore process is not that simple. To restore a site backup, the site must be created first (either through the Web UI or a command line tool) without a template and then the restore option from FrontPage can be applied.

To restore this site, follow these steps:

1. Browse to the Production WSS server and start a new site creation process at the location where you wish to restore the site:

2. Enter in your site information (Name, URL etc) and then click on “Create” to go to the template selection page

Note: The site is now created at this time (ex: http://production.wss.com/sites/site1) without a template having applied to it

3. DO NOT apply a template to the site. That means that when the following page appears, you do not click on “OK” at this page

4. From this page, click on File -> Edit in Microsoft Office FrontPage. This will open this site in FrontPage

Note: If you see a dialog box at this point telling you that “Files in _layouts folder are not available for editing”, just click on “OK” to acknowledge it

5. Now that your site is open in FrontPage, click on Tools -> Server -> Restore Web Site
6. From the “File Open” dialog box that appears, navigate to the backed up .fwp file and then click “Open”
7. Click “OK” on the “Restore Web Site” dialog box that appears

That’s it! Your Site or Site Collection that you had backed up will now be restored at this location. You can now browse to your Production site (ex: http://production.wss.com/sites/site1) to verify.