Often times you will want to back up a production SharePoint site collection and restore it to a server (or the same server) that already has one or more site collections defined.  This is very often the case when somebody has corrupted the original site collection but there’s still content you need accessible after you overwrite the original. 

What you really need to know here is how to create a managed path then, with an empty managed path you can easily restore your site to that path.  Use the “-overwrite” switch if you want to overwrite a site collection that already exists.  You can also create another web application if necessary.

Now use stsadm –o restore –url http://sharepoint/RestoreTemp –filename test.bak to restore your back to the new location.

Once you’ve brought up the site at the new location you can

• Deactivate the original site
• Use the new site to run “stsadm –o export” to migrate data between the original and new site collection (to recover from corruptions or lost data/sites
• Verify your backup/restore procedure
• etc…

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