Restore the root site as site collection with in the same web application using power shell?

Question

we migrated the sites from 2003 to 2013,in 2013 i am having root site i want to move the root site to site collection with in the same web application using power shell. I used the command after taken back up

Restore-SPSite -Identity "newly created site collection url"  -path "D:\backsite.bak"

once i ran this command i am getting the error like "Restore-SPSite: another site collection with name already exists use -force to overwrite the existing site collection "

Again i ran with using -Force command after few minutes again it was throwing error like "we can not rename the site collection"

Answer 1

Did you remove the original root site collection before running the Restore-SPSite? If not, you also need to specify a new Content database for the Site Collection.

The Restore-SPSite cmdlet performs a restoration of the site collection to a location specified by the Identity parameter. A content database may only contain one copy of a site collection. If a site collection is backed up and restored to a different URL location within the same Web application, an additional content database must be available to hold the restored copy of the site collection.

So maybe what you want to do is to:

1. Backup-SPSite
2. Delete site collection (root in this case)
3. Restore-SPSite
4. Create a new root site collection.

If you want to restore a backup of a site collection in the same Web Application without deleting the original one you can try running the Restore-SPSite with the following parameters DatabaseName and DatabaseServer. Pointing to another content DB than the one the site collection was originally on.

so something like this Restore-SPSite http://server_name/sites/site_name -Path C:\Backup\site_name.bak -Force -DatabaseServer SQLBE1 -DatabaseName SQLDB1

Answer 2

As you said, you already created a new Site Collection and trying to overwrite with root level site collections. In this case you have two choices.

Method: 1

• Create a new Content Database
• restore the site collection to newly created Database(using the database parameter of Restore command). You can not restore a site collection two times in a content database.
• delete the root site collections.
• Create root level Site collection(if you forget to create a root level site collection other site will suffered.)

Method :2

• Backup root site collection
• Delete the Site collection(root)
• Restore the site to new location
• Create root level Site collection(if you forget to create a root level site collection other site will suffered.)