moving sharepoint 2013 site collection from dev to prod

Question

I have a SharePoint 2013 site collection and would like to move this to another server. I have some branding and customization and will be good if that can also be moved if not I can reapply the styles. What will be the better approach here? I was thinking of site templates. Is there any free migration tool out there or which PowerShell command will get me as close as possible. Thanks in Advance

Answer 1

If customizations are only editing the css and designer then you have couple of choices.

Options # 1

• Backup you site collections at dev farm using Backup-spsite
• Move the backup file to destination server(prod).
• Now restore the Site collection using Restore-Spsite command. This will restore all site level customization.

Options # 2

• Backup the Content Database using SQl Server
• Restore the Content Database to Destination farm
• Now mount the content database to desired web applications.
• If you have any solution deploy to the farm.

Their are couple of choices to use the 3rd party tools, Mostly compnies offer the free trial upto 2 weeks and some upto 25GB of data migration. You try.

ShareGate or Metalogix( i used both so far good).

Answer 2

you can use STSADM also for deployment following below steps:

1) Navigate to path C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\15\BIN

2)run STSADM.EXE

3)execute the command for backup

stsadm -o backup -filename c:\filename.bak -url http://sourceurl

4)execute the command for restore

stsadm -o restore -filename c:\filename.bak -url http://destinationurl -overwrite

If you do not have any server side dependency (no files stored in 15hive directory the site would be completely restored) and the Solution you will have to again deploy it using commands.