SharePoint Preview to RTM?

Hello world....we have a site collection with a custom master page & design that we migrated from SharePoint 2010 to SP2013 Preview.  Now that the RTM bits are available on MSDN, it's been on my list to get that site migrated over from Preview to RTM.  I did not find any doco stating this cannot be done, so fingers crossed, I tried it out.

My first try was to use the backup-spsite & restore-spsite cmdlets, to see if I could move the site from the Preview server to the RTM server.  While I was able to create the backup, when I tried to use the restore-spsite command, SharePoint came back with the not-helpful Unknown SPRequest error occurred. More information: 0x80070003 error...so no go!  The ULS logs didn't mave much in there, so I scrapped the site backup approach.

What did work was the content DB approach.  I took a SQL Server backup of the source database, which had only my site in it.  Make sure the content DB doesn't have a site with the same name as one in your target farm, including the root site, since that will interfere with the 'migration'.

Restore this database backup in SQL Server to your RTM SQL instance, or restore it to a different database name & new file names if you're using the same SQL Server. 

Next up is to use the test-spcontentdatabase command:

test-spcontentdatabase -name mydbname -webapplication http://myserver.myco.com

which will come back with a set of warnings for the database.  Scan through this to make sure none will block the upgrade.  If all goes well, mount that database!

mount-spcontentdatabase -name mydbname -webapplication http://myserver.myco.com

Once done, you'll be able to open the site on the RTM version.