Restore only one site collection out of many in new farm

Question

Hi,

We are looking to make parts of a web application accessible to the internet.
To do this we are setting up an entirely new farm in our DMZ. This should only be read-only so there is no problem that external and internal users don't see/edit the same sites.

To keep the external site updated we are looking to set up a scheduled task that exports the internal site collection to the DMZ and another job restores it in the external zone.

Now, the queston is. What should we think of?
We have 5 site collections + root but we only want to make 1 site collection external.

/
/sites/SC1
/sites/SC2
/sites/SC3
/sites/SC4
/sites/SC5

Can we create a new web application in the external zone. Create an empty content database. Then only restore the root+SC5?
Or do we need to restore the entire content database from the internal zone and then make a database attach then remove SC1-SC4?

Answer 1

you may export single (needed) site collection with Backup-SPSite cmdlet and then import it to new farm with Restore-SPSite. The only thing which should be kept in mind is that SP versions should be identical on both farms (to patch level).

Answer 2

Hi Daniel,

Can we create a new web application in the external zone. Create an empty content database. Then only restore the root+SC5?

Yes this is possible. You can restore specific sites from unattached content databases. For more check out the docs:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/administration/restore-content-from-an-unattached-content-database

If I could help you, please don't forget to mark my answer as solution.

Answer 3

Hello @Daniel M ,

I agree with @Serkar Aydin 's point of view. You can restore site collections that you wanted from unattached content databases

Thanks,
Echo Du

Answer 4

Thanks for all the replies!

I have now tried this and can confirm that it works! And thanks sadomovalex for pointing out that the versions should be considered.