Backup to Another Farm with MOSS SP2

Question

There seems to be no end to conflicting information out there regarding whether or not it is necessary to use "setsitelock" when backing up a site collection for deployment to another farm, if both farms have SP2 installed.

According to Bob Fox's blog (comments disabled), it is no longer necessary: http://bobfox.securespsite.com/foxblog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=121

However, according to the STSADM blog, this luxury only comes with the April CU: http://stsadm.blogspot.com/2009/05/backuprestore-now-supported-between.html

And from what I can see, the April CU is indeed NOT part of MOSS SP2: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B7816D90-5FC6-4347-89B0-A80DEB27A082&displaylang=en

Has anyone got a definitive answer on this? Thanks :-)

Answer 1

IrishChieftain,

I agree that things get pretty darn confusing when trying to figure out how things change between service packs, cumulative updates, "uber packages," server packages ... UGH! Hopefully, this link clears things up. Read the "Important" block, as it specifically addresses your concern:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287893.aspx

The articles you cited above (Bob Fox's and Gary Lapointe's) actually deal with two different things. Bob's article talks about the automatic locking behavior that is also described in the TechNet article I cited, and it is correct.

Gary's article (the 2nd link) - which references an article from Stefan Gossner (an exceptionally well-versed MS escalation engineer, particularly in the MOSS publishing/WCM space) - doesn't describe the April CU as fixing locking behavior, but rather as providing absolute reference/link fixups for publishing sites.

Since the release of MOSS, publishing sites have been a pain in the butt from a migration, backup, and export perspective. Site templates (.STP) couldn't properly be exported out of publishing sites, and other problems existed because layout pages maintained absolute references to their hosting servers. With the April CU, workarounds for this problem should no longer be necessary.

So ... if you've got SP2 on your source farm, you should be in the clear and leveraging auto site locking on backup.

I hope this helps!