How to restore sharepoint 2013public facing website backup to a new site in testing environment?

Question

I want to create one new sharepoint site for testing using our sharepoint public facing website backup.

I know how to take the backup from sharepoint but my concern is can we take backup of a file on business hours because daily we use to get more than 1.5laks visitors.

And after taking the backup how to restore it to the new sharepoint site and I want to restore it to our testing environment. Please if anyone has idea then kindly tell me.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Regarding 1 question, assuming you are taking backup of site via central admin, backup command powershell or export command. Ideally you should do it during non business hours because, during time when backup is taken site will be made read only for some amount of time(until backup is completed). I would prefer backup command using powershell.

Backup-SPSite [-Identity] <SPSitePipeBind> -Path <String> [-AssignmentCollection <SPAssignmentCollection>] [-Confirm [<SwitchParameter>]] [-Force <SwitchParameter>] [-NoSiteLock <SwitchParameter>] [-UseSqlSnapshot <SwitchParameter>] [-WhatIf [<SwitchParameter>]]

Ref link for backup

After taking backup, you can take the backup file to your testing environment. Identify a site collection on which you need to restore the backup. Use Powershell commands to restore site.

Restore-SPSite -Identity <SiteCollectionURL> -Path <Backup file> [-DatabaseServer <DatabaseServerName>] [-DatabaseName <ContentDatabaseName>] [-HostHeader <Host header>] [-Force] [-GradualDelete] [-Verbose]

Ref link for restore

Note - Using powershell, we can only take backup of site collection, to restore a site collection we need to use powershell only.

Option to backup without power shell command.

1. Go to Central Admin on Production environment, on left panel, click on Backup and Restore. Under Granual Backup- Perform a site collection backup, select required site collection and provide file name in text box.

Other option is to attach/detach content database, but this will be lengthy process just to move a site collection from one environment to another.