Restore site collection from higher database version to lower database version

Question

I have a development SP Farm (along with Project Server) with following database version:

Configuration database version: 16.0.4534.1000

UAT SP Farm with following database version:

Configuration database version: 16.0.4600.1001

UAT SP Farm (only project server) with following database version:

Configuration database version: 16.0.4744.1000

Can I restore the site collections of UAT SP Farm into Development farm?

Or do i have to upgrade the Development Farm? If yes, should I upgrade it to DB version 16.0.4744.1000 ?

Server in dev as well as UAT are Windows Server 2012.

Any help and best practises in order to achieve above scenario is much appreciated!

Answer 1

If you restore site collection from a higher version, you may meet an error about "Schema version does not match...". For this issue, I suggest you upgrade your development environment to 16.0.4744.1000. Then restore site collections.

In addition, there is a blog about restoring site collections from higher version without installing CU, you can have a try:
How to restore site collection from higher Sharepoint version

Answer 2

You can try doing this with following steps:

• Make the backup of the Content database in UAT environment
• Restore the database to the Dev database environment
• Connect to the database using SQL Server Management Studio
• Open the table Versions in edit mode and change the value in the Version column to 16.0.4534.1000 (if there are multiple rows there, you should change the value for the row with the largest value of Id column)
• After this step the database should be ready and you can do the standard procedure (mount the content database)