A couple of weeks ago, I posted about importing/exporting SharePoint 2010 sites via PowerShell, which I used for moving a SharePoint site from one server to another. This time I wanted to perform something similiar, but within the same site collection. I can use the same process via PowerShell, but since I’m moving/copying within the same site collection, I decided to use SharePoint’s built-in functionality.
- Log into your SharePoint 2010 site
- Navigate to Site Actions > Site Settings
- Under Site Administration, click on Content and structure
- The page that follows will display site and content information in a tree structure
- To select a sub site, navigate to it’s parent site and it should appear in the right pane
- Select the sub site, by opening it’s menu (click on the white space next to it’s name)
- In the context menu, you’ll be given options to copy/move and much more.
You can still use PowerShell to move a site within the same site collection, but the Content and structure page is another option and quite useful. It’s a bit strange though that the layout and design of this page appear to be holdovers from WSS or SP2007, but they’ll probably be changing this in SharePoint 15/SP2012.
My organization’s SharePoint 2010 site does not have “Content and structure” as an option under “Site Administration.” Do you know why this might be? Is there another way to move sites?
One reason you may not able to see the “Content and structure” link is that the “SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure” site collection feature is not active.
To check if it’s active, perform the following:
- Go to Site Actions > Site Settings on your root site
- Underneath the “Site Collection Administration” section (You need to be a site collection administrator to see this section), click on “Site collection features”.
- On this page, look for “SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure” and ensure it’s activated.
Hope that helps.
Hello,
Does that copy all the Versions of docuements in document Libraries?
Thanks,
Paramvir
Hi Paramvir,
Sorry about the delayed response. I just copied a sub-site with document libraries with versioning enabled and it does not copy all versions of a document, just the latest version.
I’m not sure if there is a setting to change this, but from my quick test, it doesn’t appear that it does.
I am following the steps above but it is taking forever. It has been running for 2 hours now and it is a small site I want to move in the same collection.
Any clue?
Hi Isaac,
Yea it shouldn’t take very long for a small site as you mentioned. You may have done this, but my only suggestion for now is to open a separate browser window and check to see if the site is still in the same location or if it’s been moved to the new location within the site collection. It’s possible that the screen timed out/froze or an error was encountered and its just stuck on the screen.
Same thing happened to me just now, just copying a single webpart page. Opening the destination site in a new window showed me that the copy finished just fine, even though /_layouts/sitemanager.aspx hung.
This blog post was super-helpful — I needed a way to copy a publishing site, and the only way i knew was to save the site as a template, which is not recommended to do w/ publishing sites.
So thanks.
Hi,
I’ve been trying to do this for a while now. Used the Manage Content and Structure to copy a file to a different folder in the same site. For some reason, the copy action completes and refreshes the target folder. But the copied file is not in the destination. Any ideas?
Hi sj,
I’m not sure why that would be happening. I just tried copying a file from one document library to another between sub sites and it worked correctly. Sorry but I won’t be of much help to solve the problem you’re facing. Hope you can get it figured out.
In my context menu, Copy is not available, but Move is. Same with the Actions menu (Copy is shaded). Any ideas why that would be?
Hi Mat,
I’m not entirely sure why that would be happening. There are times when certain functions are restricted if items are checked out within a library, but if you are trying to Copy a Site, I’m not sure why it isn’t available. If all else fails, you can always try to create a template based off the site with the content and create a new site using the template. Hope that helps a bit.