Creating SharePoint 2010 site collections in a test environment becomes tedious and definitely no fun especially when you need a 5 or 6 levels deep “Lorem Ipsum” dummy site with tons of pages under them. But, what if you have already created a previous dummy site that fits all your requirements for your next project and you just don’t have the time and patience to recreate it manually? I was in this situation the other day and I refused to do it manually again, so I started to do some research. It took me awhile to find something useful and finally I managed to put together two different PowerShell scripts that does the trick. I don’t say this is the best way to do it but it worked perfectly for me.

So, first find the site you would like to clone. Head over to SharePoint 2010 Management Shell, open it, copy the following script and paste it. (Right-click >> Paste) and hit Enter. Make sure you plug your site URL for Identity attribute and pick a path where to backup your site and a name for your backup.

Backup-SPSite -Identity "http://myspsite" -Path "C:\backups\myspsite.bak" -Force -Confirm:$False

Next, you need to create your new web application manually. Go to “Central Administration” >> “Manage web applications” >> New. For testing purposes let’s call it myspsite and if you don’t use any host headers you need to pick a port number, so we picked :81 since our main site uses port 80 by default. Our new site URL would be http://myspsite:81

Now, we need to restore our newly backed up main site (http://myspsite) to the newly created site (http://myspsite:81) so it can inherit all the site/page structure. Go back to the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell, copy the following script and paste it. (Right-click >> Paste) and hit Enter.

Restore-SPSite "http://myspsite:81" -Path C:\backups\myspsite-81.bak -Force -Confirm:$False

If you didn’t get any errors, your new site looks pretty much like the main site just under different URL. Notice that your new site inherited tons of stuff from the main site: security settings, themes, master pages, page layouts, title… That means you still have some minor clean-up to do but this is nothing compare to what you had to go thru by creating all the those sites and pages manually.