Unable to access sites during a SharePoint DR test

Question

Our company does not have hot DR site for our SharePoint environment. So we are using the process to restore the data to our DR site:

1. Create all site collections in DR pointing to the same ContentDatabase name as it's counterpart in production (example if: http://prodsite/teams/team1 was pointing to PRD_ContentDB3 then we setup http://drsite/teams/team1 to point to PRD_ContentDB3 on the DR SQL Server).

2. Detatch and then delete the databases created in #1.

3. Restore production databases to the DR SQL Server. Update all security on the databases to match production, but using the DR accounts.

4. Ran Powershell to re-attatch the database to SharePoint.

We are setup with CLAIMS authentication.

Once the restore was done, we could not connect to the sites that existed in production. Every site returns an error: "Sorry, something went wrong. File not Found. If I create a new site collection in a new content database it works fine. If I create a new site collection in a DB from prod it works, but anything that existed in prod will not work (including the root).

We have a DB alias setup that matches production (except points to the DR SQL server). Has anyone else had this before? Have I missed a step somewhere?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

As per Your DR scenario, you have two independent farm. I would recommend the following steps.

• Setup the DR farm same as Prod Farm( which i believe you have).
• Now Create the web app and configure the same authentication etc.
• Now take the backup the content database from Production sql server
• Restore the database on the DR farm and attached to the web app.
• From central admin > application management >view all site collections... check all your production sites are here. also make sure root level site collection is their.."/".

Note: no need to create the site collections in advance, as you are restoring the DB it will take care of it.