Save a Site Collection As A Site Template (.stp) File

Question

I would like to be able to save a SharePoint 2007 site collection as a site template (.stp) file. Is this possible?

Thanks, MagicAndi

Answer 1

A site template (.stp) is merely the "surfacing" of a given SP site. If you want to backup/restore an entire site collection you have only a couple of options:

stsadm -o restore -url http://mysite/sites/sitecollection -filename myfile -overwrite
stsadm -o import -url http://mysite/sites/sitecollection -filename myfile.cmp -updateversions 2

Out of these two, the first one made me tear my hair out less.

Answer 2

Site Actions -> Site Settings -> (under look and feel) Save site as template hth

Answer 3

You cannot save the whole website structure of a site collection (SPSite) into a single site template file. A site templates is only for single website (SPWeb). But you can backup and restore a site collection via the STSADM tool.

Perhaps you tell us what you're trying to archive, this way you might get better answers.