Content DB's & SSP's are sensitive - Beware of restoring ContentDB issues

Last friday, I was trying to take a back-up of a contentDB from one farm to restored it to another without removing the contentDB on the second farm.

Farm1 had the latest content and I wanted to move the Content DB from there to Farm2.

Farm1 : http://farm1.spiderwool.com ContentDB : farm1_spider_ContentDB

Farm2 : http://farm2.spiderwool.com ContentDB : farm2_spider_ContentDB

Instead of removing the content database at the web app http://farm2.spiderwool.com and restoring with the farm1 content database. I directly restored the farm1_spider_ContentDB over farm2_spider_ContentDB

Note : Please read the full post before trying any commands specified.

I faced the following issues:

Issue 1:

Failure trying to synch web application ab9788f9-d490-4785-8d4a-3666e1af13d3, ContentDB 0f17f1de-d2cb-8890-9ead-c21fb54ac8d4 Exception message was A duplicate site ID 8768xdsd98-0c57-421b-be76-fa71f0f20375(http://) was found. This might be caused by restoring a content database from one server farm into a different server farm without first removing the original database and then running stsadm -o preparetomove. If this is the cause, the stsadm -o preparetomove command can be used with the -OldContentDB command line option to resolve this issue.

Issue 2:

MySite was crashing.

I tried the follwoing:

Try 1:

stsadm -o preparetomove -contentdb -site -oldcontentdb

Didn't help

Try 2:

Created a new SSP but the SSP admin application wasn't opening. I was getting a "Critical error Encountered. Contact your administrator" message.

Try 3:

X = days within you did this contentDB restoration

stsadm -o sync -listolddatabases

stsadm -o sync -deleteolddatabases

In my case, X =0

This definitely solved my duplicate issue (issue 1) but still didn't solve my Issue 2

Try 4 was the solution to get everything working:

1. Deleted the application http://farm2.spiderwool.com without removing the contentDB

2. created a new web application with same name http://farm2.spiderwool.com (contentDb : tempContentDB)

3. Removed the content DB (tempContentDB) of the new application

4. Added the content DB farm2_spider_ContentDB to the new app (http://farm2.spiderwool.com)

5. created a new SSP

6. SSP admin site was opening without any error

7. Added the appropriate import connections on user profiles. Did a crawl to get all the users

8. My web app http://farm2.spiderwool.com got associated to the new ssp. If not associate it manually.

9. ran this command

stsadm -o sync -listolddatabases

stsadm -o sync -deleteolddatabases

stsadm -o sync -listolddatabases (verification)

10. Things started working like a charm (Mysite started working). you can delete the old SSP if you want.

I nearly spent the whole weekend. Hope this saves some time.

Good Luck!