Migration: Best approach for migrating a site, subsites and all content to another web application

Question

I am doing cleanup of a sharepoint intranet and one of the tasks is to break the team sites into their own web application. Problem is, there is a lot of content to move over, but not enough to warrant using a third party tool.

An idea I had was to basically clone the intranet into another web app, and then delete everything except the team sites. But, this sounds like it might result in orphaned content.

Is this approach viable? Is there a better solution?

Thanks

Answer 1

Use Backup-SPSite and Restore-SPSite

Backup-SPSite -Identity "https://oldwebapp/sites/sitetomove" -Path "C:\Backup\sitetomove.bak"

Restore-SPSite -Identity "https://newwebapp/sites/newsite" -Path "C:\Backup\sitetomove.bak"

Answer 2

I will suggest to use 3rd party tool for doing so. As these OOTB methods turns out to be problematic for certain unexplored areas like: custom Workflows, Items version history, WF associations, custom web parts, Infopath Forms, blocked file types and many more...

If your migration size is limited then you can use Metalogix tool, or Sharegate migration tools as Free versions