0

I have a very large site collection with 10,000s of documents. I want to create a copy of the site collection but not necessarily all of the content. Is there a good way to make a cop of a site collection but not include the content?

I attempted making a site template through the UI but it kept processing for hours the two times I did it and nothing came of it.

Is there a better way?

Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

On SharePoint 2007, it was possible before creating a template to exclude content

Site Settings page > Look and Feel section > Save site as template > Include Content section, uncheck the Include Content check box) guess it should be similar for SP2010 / 2013. (edit : indeed, it's like that in SP2010 as well)

enter image description here

An easy way would be to

  • create a full backup of the site (stsadm -o backup -url {your-site-collection-url} -filename "c:\temp.bak")
  • empty all non required content from that site collection
  • create a backup / template (or export the cleaned site)
  • restore the temporary full backup (stsadm -o restore-url {your-site-collection-url} -filename "c:\temp.bak" -overwrite)

Third solution, I would investiguate into the trusty tool made by Chris O Brien http://spdeploymentwizard.codeplex.com/ which might help to get your expected requirement. The tool is open source, I guess it shouldn't be too hard to identify the component responsible for persisting the content and bypassing-it to get only the structure. Would love to have feedback from the master (or check the discussion on codeplex, someone might have thought of this before me !)

Improve this answer
5
  • (1) I attempted to do this through the web UI but it kept on spinning with no results. I attempted to do this through SPD but the option was grayed out. (2) I thought about the command line option but there is about 300GB of data / 100+ libraries / 80,000+ documents. I was looking for a way to not duplicate that much content.
    – RWL01
    Commented Nov 28, 2012 at 19:26
  • The UI will struggle for sure with 300gb, it's already dead on environment with 4/5gb :( If it's a virtual environment, wouldn't it be faster to ask for a separate copy and do the processing on that snapshot environment (obviously outside of the current network to avoid conflicts). Good luck.
    – Francois Verbeeck
    Commented Nov 29, 2012 at 9:31
  • I agree it would but the goal was to bypass processing the 300GB all together. I can't mark it as an answer because of this but I appreciate your input.
    – RWL01
    Commented Nov 29, 2012 at 19:43
  • You could reverse engineer the site template creation to check how they are querying the content of a specific spweb / spsite (all libraries, lists, fields, content types, webs, etc,) and extracting all the meta information to get the structure. Finally I would also investigate into the content deployment API, they might have a way to get what you're expecting.
    – Francois Verbeeck
    Commented Nov 30, 2012 at 13:42
  • edited the reply to also include the tool from Chris O Brien. (mandatory in all SP IT / Dev blackbelt !)
    – Francois Verbeeck
    Commented Nov 30, 2012 at 13:46

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.