reason #312 why I hate SharePoint

I know, everyone has many reasons to hate SharePoint, and they are all valid. So, this is really just another in a long stream, but I wanted to share it any way.

We were tasked to create a staging environment which mirrored production. Sounds simple, right? Wrong. The first naive step was to create a site collection backup of production. Getting it onto the staging environment proved painful enough due to its size, but after it was finally uploaded I thought we were home free. The restore failed... repeatedly... miserably. The error message that displayed was: "The site collection could not be restored. If this problem persists, please make sure the content databases are available and have sufficient free space." I tried increasing the database size. I freed up room on the hard disk. I created a blank SharePoint site and tried to restore into that since every time I ran the restore into the existing SharePoint site the database just kept getting bigger, bigger than the production database, even though I was specifying "overwrite".

After happening upon a post where a restore was generating the same error message I noticed one responder said to can the whole site collection restore notion and just do a backup/restore of the content database.

I did it, it worked. W00T! It's not complete in that we still have to manually get the customizations back into the site, but it at least got us about 85% - 90% there.