Production SharePoint Site to Sandbox Overwrite/Refresh Steps

I believe firmly that if you are going to *play* in SharePoint, you should play in a sandbox, and ideally, with production *like* data.  To accomplish this for clients, I generally provide a ‘sandbox’ site, in addition to their production WSS site.

So, for example, if a client had a portal at https://portal.mycompany.com, I’d likely have a ‘sandbox’ for them at http://sandbox.mycompany.com. Then, on request or occasion, I’d *refresh* the sandbox with the latest version of their production site (and I’d also then change the colour theme to something that really stands out – i.e. ugly – so it is clear they are not manipulating their production data).

Based on the outline above, this is how the refresh would be handled…

   1: cd %COMMONPROGRAMFILES%Microsoft sharedWeb server extensions12Bin

   2:  

   3: REM Back it up...

   4: stsadm -o backup -url https://portal.mycompany.com:443 -filename "D:TOPportal2sandboxswapportalbackup.bak"

   5:  

   6: REM Restore it to sandbox...

   7: stsadm -o restore -url http://sandbox.mycompany.com:80 -overwrite -filename "D:TOPportal2sandboxswapportalbackup.bak"

   8:  

   9: REM Reset IIS 'cause I like to...

  10: IISRESET