I’ll start with we are using smigrate for this migration since I failed to mention it in the body of my text below.

We have been going through a migration from one set of servers to another set and everything has been going fine thus far. Last weekend we backed up a site that, in compressed format, was a total of 43GB. When restoring the site it skipped over one of its subsites and finished restoring all the rest. I thought maybe it was an error with the servers or the backup file so I backed up just the subsite alone and it was 33GB compressed (the largest up to this point had been 14GB). When attempting to restore the site it came back with a timeout error the first few times. It would just sit there for about 20 minutes and then it would go back to the prompt. I have my report going to a log instead of to the screen and each time it showed only that it had done the manifest file, set up the tasks and then timed out. It never mentions any file transfers or other errors the first few times These servers are live and in use so I thought maybe it was just traffic slowing everything down. Upon checking the CPUs and the Network usage I realized that this was not the issue since each was at below 5% usage. System event logs showed nothing. I checked and found the document which went over the way all the settings should be. Timeout is set for 65000, file upload size is set to 1GB, blocked file types are set the same on both the old and new portal, pagefile is set for a min. of 2GB, etc. None of this helped except that now the error wasn’t a timeout but a “server/site not found. Verify that the name is correct and that the proxy settings are correct”. Name is correct and there is no proxy. On a whim, after the 13th or 14th attempt, I used FrontPage to view the top level site and noticed thet subsite. Took a look at it and there was 461MB (which after ten minutes went up to 514mb even though the restore process hads already errored out) worth of files in there and a total of about 6000 files had been transferred. I deleted the site, recreated, didn’t apply any template (as I had done every time before), verifed via FP that it was empty and tried again. Sure enough it errored out and, when checked via FP, the files were there again and it was exactly the same numbers and it increased in size and files exactly the same way as before. To say I am perplexed is an understatement. It’s stating it cannot find the site yet its still moving data over? This is why I think it is still a timeout issue. I checked the web parts, the files, etc and there seems to be nothing untoward in the old site but to be honest I am not even sure where it is failing since the log file is so. So, as it stands right now I am backing up the site with FP and am going to try with it although I haven’t really had much success with large sites and FP in the past.

It all boils down to, anyone have any ideas on what could be wrong? I have truly run out of ideas and this site is NOT going to be the largest one we migrate. I’d really appreciate any tips. I haven’t mentioned exactly every little detail I checked and set but if it was here:

www.microsoft.com/.../stsf12.mspx