One of my clients recently needed help with restoring a WSS 3.0 site collection to a separate content database in order to migrate it (via detach-attach method) to a new SP Foundation environment. This obviously could be achieved by splitting the content database if the site collection already exists in one. However, if you are trying to work with a site collection that has been previously backed up, then you would have to resort to restoring the site collection to a new content database.
Microsoft has a very detailed Technet article that outlines how to perform a backup and restore of site collections in WSS 3.0. While my client was following the steps outlined in it, he still ran into an Access Denied error while trying to perform the restore via STSADM.
Microsoft clearly states the following as the only requirement to perform a site collection restore (Apart from returning the site lock setting to its pre-backup status).
Membership in the Administrators group on the local computer is the minimum required to complete this procedure.
However, turns out this is not the case. After digging into ULS logs and going over permissions in Central Administration, I was able to figure out that in order to successfully restore a site collection, the current user has to be a site collection administrator for the particular site collection. This is obviously an oversight from Microsoft’s part (probably due to the fact that, in most cases, the admin account ends up being a site collection admin. But not in this scenario).
Even though WSS 3.0 is slowly going into extinction, I hope this will be useful for someone who runs into the same issue.
