Sign up ×

I'm about to perform a DB migration of an Intranet Publishing Site. Is it necessary to create the site collection before performing the DB restore?

share|improve this question
FYI.. I'm removing the 2007/2010 tags from your Migration questions since you have that information elsewhere in the questions and these aren't necessarily version specific. –  Kit Menke Aug 8 '12 at 18:50

2 Answers 2

up vote 3 down vote accepted

To be clearer, you actually only need an Web Application to which you would attach the database. I would highly recomand before doing that go through checking/testing at least by using:

  1. Test-SPContentDatabase which will tell you if you got all other dependencies installed, etc. (
  2. Run pre-upgrade checker (see here

Also you would need at least MOSS with SP2 to be able to run these commands. There is so much documentation written on the subject. Start here

share|improve this answer
It seems preupgradecheck tool was updated with the Oct 2009 CU. So people would need to upgrade to at least that in their 2007 farm first:… –  IrishChieftain Aug 14 '12 at 16:31

Yes, typically the I usually do it is, provision a web application and a site collesction then I detach the content database, copy the database accross and attach db to the site collection.

Use this to mount DB to the existing sitecollection after attaching to the new server:

Mount-SPContentDatabase "" -DatabaseServer "" -WebApplication siteUrl

share|improve this answer

Your Answer


