I needed to move a subsite (a blog) to a new farm but when using the stsadm -o export command the resulting backup contained no data.
The exact command I used is:
stsadm -o export -url https://oldserver/isit/blog -versions 4 -filename c:\temp\blog.bak
I tried with the content database in the “ready” as well as the “offline” state. I tried to use -nofilecompression in order to look at the resulting XML and all of them were 1 kb in size.
The blog has 415 entries and when I saved it as a web site template it became roughly 250 Kb so I was sure that the backup file should be more than 1 kb in size.
Finally it dawned upon me: the user I was logged in as didn’t have any access to the site in question. I started cmd.exe as the site collection owner and hey presto, everything worked as it should.
martinnr5