Just a quick query. We're refreshing a sitecollection in our MOSS dev environment with content from production. I'm running the preparetomove switch on prod before taking a backup of the site collection using stsadm. stsadm o preparetomove contentdb [servername:databasename] site [http://sitecollectionURL] stsadm o backup http://[sitecollectionURLsource] filename \\server\[filename].bak My query is do I need to undo the preparetomove on prod once the backup is complete or is this an automatic process ? documentation isn't very clear only saying it's temporary (for how long ?) eg: stsadm o preparetomove contentdb [servername:databasename] site [http://sitecollectionURL] -undo and do i need to undo on the dev environment aswell once the content is refreshed.

You don't need to use the preparetomove stsadm operation when performing a site collection backup; for site collections, it's specifically used when moving it to a new location in the farm (hence the name). When you take a backup you're not moving the site collection (you're creating a copy in a new farm). My understanding is it is temporary in the sense that once you move it, SharePoint will notice you have told it you were moving the site collection and process it accordingly in the new location. That is, there is no time limit, the temporary-ness of the command is simply a flag that says "when you move or reattach this site collection it will need to processed to hook up the profile data" When you restore a site collection in a different farm, SharePoint will set all this up automatically since it is new. Jason Warren Infrastructure Architect Habanero Consulting Group habaneroconsulting.com/blog