If you attempt to restore a backup of a site collection more than once to the same content database, you may get the following error message: “No content databases are available for restoring this site collection. Create a new content database and then try the restore operation again.” This is because the globally-unique identifiers (GUID) for lists are preserved in the backup file and reused during restore, but the content database requires list GUIDs to be unique. Therefore, you cannot restore a site collection twice to the same content database, and must instead use a different content database.
- Now that we have that sorted out, you can perform this optional step (you would generally want to do this)
- To remove the original site type stsadm –o deletesite –url http://server/sites/site1
- Now we are ready to restore to our new site name, type the following in the command prompt
- stsadm –o restore –url http://server/sites/site2 -filename %systemdrive%\backup.dat
We have now successfully restored the original site into a new site collection, with a new name
