Brainlitter » SharePoint Designer Restore from MOSS to WSS (could not find feature error resolution)

SharePoint Designer Restore from MOSS to WSS (could not find feature error resolution)

 

While attempting to perform a SharePoint Sub-site restore, using SharePoint Designer 2007, from a nested MOSS installation (https://portal.company.com/projects/supersaucesite) to a dedicated WSS site (root collection), I ran into the following error.

 

Error occurred while importing the web http://xxxxxx.  Could not find Feature DataConnectionLibrary

 

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The problem is, the source site had MOSS 2007 which has the ‘DataConnectionLibrary’ feature (and one not exposed via the Site Settings that I could simply deactivate), and the destination server (running WSS 3.0) did not.  While there are several ways to skin this cat, this is the approach I took first and worked a charm (still working in SharePoint Designer, except for having to deactivate a feature in the subsite I was backing up from using the STSADM tool).

 

Here’s what I did to succeed

 

  1. I connected to the console of the MOSS Server, and performed the following using the STSADM command (to disable the feature in the original site, as I wasn’t even using it):
stsadm -o deactivatefeature -name DataConnectionLibrary -url https://portal.company.com/projects/supersaucesite -force

STSADM returned “Operation completed successfully“.

I then attempted my SharePoint Designer backup again, from the source site (https://portal.company.com/projects/supersaucesite).

 

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And it went fine…

 

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Then I did my restore… (choosing, like the backup above, Sites, Administration, Restore Web Site…)

 

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And Voila! Now I have success.  Sweet.

 

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