I'm running into some issues exporting a web from my current MOSS 2007 SP1 environment. My end goal is to migrate the web into its own site collection, but step #1 is to actually get a proper export of the web alone. I assume the problems I'm having are due to the size of the web that I'm trying to export (estimates are about 65000 files totaling about 40gb of data contained in the web), but I don't really see any way around that. At any rate, the stsadm export command executes fine at first, backing up all of the files in each of the document libraries successfully to my temp drive. According to the logs, the issues start after the files themselves have been exported, and the process starts querying for the list item metadata. When I get into the section where the log states "Progress: Exporting ListItem *", the export seems to hang. The log shows processing of 200 items at a time through this stage, but each set of 200 items takes somewhere on the order of 40 to 50 minutes. With some fuzzy math, this places my total time to export this site at around 14 days, real time, which obviously is unacceptable to the users. When I look at the SQL server behind the farm, one sometimes two of the four CPUs are pegged to 100% trying to process the content DB queries driving the export. When I bring up the activity monitor to check which query is doing the most damage, I see my export query running a potentially very slow query, but even with the worst SQL syntax imaginable, I can't see a query for 200 records taking almost an hour. Has anyone else had similar problems with the export command running over a large web? Is there a possibility that an upgrade to SP2 will upgrade the performance of the SQL queries running behind the scenes? Is there any known remedy that I can apply to the database sever to make these export queries execute more efficiently? Any help at all is appreciated.

Hi, In the description I can see that you have mentioned that you want to migrate this within the same site collection. Hence I suggest you following: 1. First of all take full backup of the content database holding your entire site collection. This should be at DB level. 2. Then create a blank site at the location in the site collection using the same template your source web use. 3. Then save your list and libraries as template in yoursouce site(First trying to create it with data if forsome libraries data is huge then save it without data). 4. As your web is going to be created in the same site collection these templates will be available to your destination web also. 5. Then create the list and libraries using these templates. 6. For the templates created without data you can copy out the data using Site Managaer. This you can access by adding _layouts/SiteManager.aspx to site url. I hope this will help. Thanks, Rahul Rashu

Hi, In the description I can see that you have mentioned that you want to migrate this within the same site collection. Hence I suggest you following: 1. First of all take full backup of the content database holding your entire site collection. This should be at DB level. 2. Then create a blank site at the location in the site collection using the same template your source web use. 3. Then save your list and libraries as template in yoursouce site(First trying to create it with data if forsome libraries data is huge then save it without data). 4. As your web is going to be created in the same site collection these templates will be available to your destination web also. 5. Then create the list and libraries using these templates. 6. For the templates created without data you can copy out the data using Site Managaer. This you can access by adding _layouts/SiteManager.aspx to site url. I hope this will help. Thanks, Rahul Rashu

Maybe I worded it poorly, but I don't that solution will work, because my intent is not to copy the web within the same site collection, but to migrate the web into an entirely new site collection. For example: http://server/Department1 (web within main Site Collection) needs to be transferred into http://server/sites/Department1 (new Site Collection) From my understanding, the above methods using site manager will not work in a cross-sitecollection situation. Anything I've read points to exporting (using stsadm -o export) the source web fas the first step to accomplishing my goal, without using any costly third-party export tools. I'm unable to use the stsadm backup/restore commands because the source web exists in a site collection containing far more than the one web I wish to export.

Maybe I worded it poorly, but I don't that solution will work, because my intent is not to copy the web within the same site collection, but to migrate the web into an entirely new site collection. For example: http://server/Department1 (web within main Site Collection) needs to be transferred into http://server/sites/Department1 (new Site Collection) From my understanding, the above methods using site manager will not work in a cross-sitecollection situation. Anything I've read points to exporting (using stsadm -o export) the source web fas the first step to accomplishing my goal, without using any costly third-party export tools. I'm unable to use the stsadm backup/restore commands because the source web exists in a site collection containing far more than the one web I wish to export.