Colon a SharePoint web application

I was asked to colon a web application, essentially this is just to backup/restore content db. sounds very simple? but a couple very costly pitfalls:

First, if new web app resides in the same farm, the challenge is, each collection Id has to be unique.

• use stsadm addcontentdb to assign a different id, but as warned by MS, the site collection very likely becomes an orphan;
• use stsadm backup/restore for each individual site collection;

Second, it is very tempting to take this shortcut: create a web application and then do content database backup/restore. This is an absolute failure path since SharePoint Config DB is left out totally.

The working path is:

• Restore the content DB (if in the same SQL instance, file names need to be changed)
• creating a new web application in a different farm, use the restored db to replace the one randomly generated by SP

or

• after web application being created, use stsadm -o addcontentdb cmd line or UI to add the restored db, and then remove the one auto-generated by SP.

whether stsadm or UI, the credential needs to have access to the database. In case of UI, it is farm account(running central admin pool) and of course it is logon user account for stsadm. SharePoint will grant all other pool ids (such as application portal pool id) for the database access.