Is it possible to move RBS filetream blob to database again

Question

This may sound stupid but i am running into situation where i have backup of content-db that had RBS enabled from SP 2010 and i am going to migrate it to SharePoint 2013.

I just have a backup , and i restored it in SQL 2014 but not attached to any web-application yet. How do i remove file stream blob and get those back in SQL from the content-db before attaching it to SharePoint?

Answer 1

You can move BLOBs back to the content database. If you do that, you still have the extended database-schema of RBS. If you also want to get rid of this, you should move your SiteCollections to a new content database. Then migrate it to SharePoint 2013.

• Make sure you have enough diskspace on your SQL-Server to hold all migrated data

• Check the number if externalized BLOBs in your database with the following SQL-Query:
  select COUNT(*) from AllDocStreams where RbsId is not null

• Use the following PowerShell to migrate your data back to the database:

  $db= Get-SPContentDatabase -Name
  $rbs = $db.RemoteBlobStorageSettings
  $rbs.SetActiveProviderName("")
  $rbs.Migrate()

• You should now get a number of 0 if you execute the SQL-Query from step 2 again. Please note that your BLOBs will not be deleted from your BLOB-Disk by the Migrate() function!

• Create a new empty SharePoint contentdatabase via CentralAdmin or New-SPContentDatabase

• Move your SiteCollections (one after each other) with Move-SPSite to your newly created contentdatabase (Move-SPSite http://servername/sites/sitename -DestinationDatabase YourNewDatabase)

• Please note that your SiteCollection will not be available during the move-process. Moving large sites can take a lot of time (hours). Do not interrupt the process (CTRL+C) as it will result in a broken SiteCollection!

• If no longer required, you can delete the old database with Remove-SPContentDatabase