Backing up and restoring a sharepoint content database across two machines, hosed my sharepoint app

Question

I have sharepoint sites provisioned on two machines A and B. I would like to take the content database from machine A and restore it into the site on machine B. I used SQL backup to backup machine A's database, and restored it to machine B, overwriting the existing content database. However, my sharepoint site became unreachable - I would get a generic site not found error. Did I also have to back up and restore SharePoint_Config database too? What is the best practices for this kind of scenario?

Answer 1

You need to tell sharepoint where your new database is. just go to the content database management page on central administration. there you will see your previous database mapped to the web application. remove it and and the new database. it will map the web app to it and your sites will come back. be careful when entering the server and database name, as you could create a new db instead of connecting to the existing one if you mistype the name