Refresh My Sites DBs in UAT that was converted to ADFS

Question

We have a staging enviroment that has been converted from NTLM to ADFS. The user profiles have already been migrated to ADFS. What I realized after the fact is that when we created the staging environment (and before the ADFS conversion), we did not copy over the My Sites content DBs, so there is only a handful of my sites (users who have acess the environment).

My prod environment has 4 My Site DBs:

• SP2013_PROD_Content_MySites_Host
• SP2013_PROD_Content_MySites_01
• SP2013_PROD_Content_MySites_02
• SP2013_PROD_Content_MySites_03

Whereas staging only has one, the host: SP2013_UAT_Content_MySites_Host

My question is, if I want to copy over the prod my sites, do I need to overwrite the MySites_Host DB in staging or do I just bring over the others?

Is the MySites_Host DB the same as the others or is it some kind of config database that is specific to the instance when SP was installed (like the SP config DB)?

Also, I wonder if I am going to have to remove the my sites web app from the ADFS realm (back to NTLM) before I do this.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

If the MySite Host database only contains the MySite Host Site Collection, the only information that it may contain is user profile pictures, should you be importing or populating them.

If you want to bring over the user's MySites and have them attached to profiles, you'll need to bring over the MySite databases along with the Profile database from the UPSA.