Exportation of Sites

Today I am at a client's reinstalling their SharePoint environment and one of the things I needed to do was backup the current sites they were using and move them over to the new installation. I knew this could easily be achieved using the stsadm export and import commands. I began by exporting the smaller of the two sites and then tried the larger site. I received an error that read 'Failed to compare two objects in the array.' I did some searching on Google to look for anyone else having this problem and there were a few out there that said it was an issue with a feature being uninstalled on the server and the site was looking for that feature.

I checked with the client to see if they were using any of the sites that were giving me a problem and they said they weren't (which is a good thing for me) as I could just delete those sites. For those of you that don't have the luxury of that case, you will need to search through all of the features to find the one that matches the GUID that is in the error. If the feature is not there, then hopefully you can find another copy of it, otherwise you won't be able to perform the export.

Once I finally got all of the sites exported, I copied over all the custom feature folders to the new server's 12 hive (if you don't do this the import will throw an error). I also made sure to copy any custom site templates over to the new server's 12\Template\SiteTemplate folder (if you don't do this either, the import will throw an error). One other thing that I forgot to check that hung me up was custom assemblies in the GAC of the new server. I was missing some and when I tried to do the import it said I was missing a feature, so I tried to install the feature using stsadm installfeature and that failed saying it couldn't find the assemblies. I imported the smaller site and took a look at some of the pages to make sure everything was importing all right.

What I found was that when exporting a site and then importing it to a new SharePoint installation the List View Web Part does not maintain the list view that it is suppose to display. There were some pages that contained the List View Web part and pointed to a List View that the users had created. When I went to any of these pages they all showed the default view for the list. I could not find anyone else that was having this issue, so I set to work changing the web parts back to the view they were originally using on the old installation.