Backup and Restore SharePoint 2010 Site Collection

PowerShell to the rescue again.
We have Central Administration to take care of your backup and restoration process but PowerShell commands are much more straight forward and easy to follow.

To Backup your SharePoint 2010 Site Collection
1. Fireup PowerShell.
2. Run the following command

backup-spsite -identity http://MySharePointSiteCollection:1111 -path c:\BackupFolder\1111.bak

Here -identity represents the site collection you want to backup and -path represents the fully qualified path along with the filename (with .bak extension) where you want to backup your site collection.
Once the process is complete, you will find your .bak file at the path specified.

For a complete list of options and parameters user PowerShell help

To Restore your SharePoint 2010 Site Collection
If you want to restore the backup on a different Site Collection/Web Application

If you want to restore the backup on an existing Site Collection/Web Application
1. Fireup PowerShell.
2. Run the following command

restore-spsite -identity http://MySharePointSiteCollection:1111 -path c:\BackupFolder\1111.bak


restore-spsite -identity http://contosoweb -path \\server\backupshare\backupfile.bak