SharePoint 2013 moving data to another server

Question

I have SharePoint 2013 Enterprise version. It is installed from last 3 years.

Topology as below

1. SQL01 (Clustered)
2. SQL02 (Clustered)
3. FE01 (load balance)
4. FE02 (load balance)
5. APP01
6. APP02

Now I got development server, which is just freshly installed with SQL Server 2012 & Windows 2012 R2. Now I am installing SharePoint 2013 and updating it to match the version of the Production Farm. It will remain single box farm.

Now my question is if I backup Production Version which is multiple server and try restore on Development Server which is single box, will it work or do I have to do something?

Answer 1

Yes it should work because it's not a matter of how many servers you have, if it's a single farm then you can migrate it to from a multi servers environment to your new single box environment by migrating the content databases.

Answer 2

As you already get the answer but I would like to give my 2 cents. to avoid any unknown issue.

• Install and configure the SharePoint on Dev server( Version should match to prod)
• Create new service accounts and set the permission.
• Create new Web app (s)
  • Configure the authentication as in Production
  • Apply customization if any i.e Web.config change etc
  • configure the Object cache, Blob cache if it is in Prod
• Apply if any farm wide solutions
• create the new service application i.e search, UPA, MMS

Now - Backup Content Database from Prod SQL server - Move the backup to dev sql server and Restore it - Attach the database to web apps - Test

I would not go with the SharePoint central admin backup and restore, as it may cause alot of confusion in naming conventions.