Restoring from a completely different farm backup

Question

I'm sure this will sound like a very novice question and many will wonder the application of such an action, but here goes.

Say I have two different single-server SharePoint instances (2 different servers each with their own databases). If I did a farm backup on Server A, could I then go into Server B > Central Admin > Restore from Backup > select Server A's farm backup, and now Server B's SharePoint looks exactly like Server A?

Answer 1

This cannot be answered with yes or no. There are many things to consider:

• Target farm's patchlevel needs to be equal or greater than source farm.
• Does the new farm have the same license? If you are on enterprise and target farm is standard you wont be able to use the database.
• Does the new farm have all ServiceApplications installed?
• You cannot merge every ServiceApplication without 3rd party tools (like ManagedMetaData Service)
• You need to apply all customizations, configuration and farm-solutions to the new farm. Maybe you need to move a license or even upgrade a license if the target farm has more servers than the source farm
• Configure PeoplePicker to resolve people from the 1way trusted domain