Duplicate Site Collection allows you to create a duplicate of an existing site collection. This is useful if you need to create multiple sites with the same structure, or if you would like to use an existing site as a base to build a new site off of.
Note: To migrate your site collections to a new environment or if you wish to have more options use Copy Structure.
Prerequisite
- You are connected to your Microsoft 365 tenant or SharePoint farm with Global admin or Farm admin permissions.
- You have site collection admin permissions on the site collection you want to duplicate.
Note: You need to have site collection admin permissions even if you have higher admin privileges like SharePoint admin or Global admin permissions. For more information click here.
Index
How-To
- Select the site you want to duplicate.
- click Duplicate Site Collection
in the quick actions panel. - Select you preferred options (see below for all details).
- Click
- The task will now run.
- You can access the results anytime through Tasks.
- For more information on the results, see Results.
Options
Title, Description, and URL
You can use these fields to give your new duplicate site your preferred name (required), description (optional), and URL (required). The URL will automatically be the same as the name, but can be manually changed.
You can change the managed path of the URL (available managed paths will appear in the drop-down menu).
Note: Explicit paths are not displayed with the site duplication option, but you can change this in the ShareGate Desktop Migration too.
Site Collection Administrator
You can leave this option as is or change it to select a new administrator.
If you want to select a new administrator, use the X to delete the current one, begin typing the name of the new administrator, and select them from the drop down.
Elements to Include
Select which elements you would like to include from the original site collection.
Quotas
Storage Quota
Choose between Automatic (default) and Manual.
See here for more information on how to check quota data for a site.
Server Resource Quota
You can leave the default (300) or manually input your preference.
See here for more information on storage limits.
Results
Once the Duplicate Site Collection action is finished running, you will see your results page.
You can see if an operation was successful in the Status column.
If there is a warning or error, you can see the reason in the Details column, and access more information by clicking the Help Me Solve This link.
Note: If you duplicate content to Microsoft 365 the files are first copied to Azure Storage before being copied to your environment, so you may see a status bar indicating that Microsoft 365 is importing items even after duplication is complete. This information will also be available in Tasks.
Filter your results by clicking Filter in the top-right corner.
Switch which columns you see using the Manage Columns button in the top-right corner.
Export your results to Excel by clicking 
in the top-right corner.
Comments
15 comments
Is it per design that this can only be done in the same tenant? We are trying to migrate a site from another tenant, but only the tenant the source site is located shows up in the URL box (grayed out)
Hi Jonathan,
I understand the confusion. The duplicate option is meant to quickly duplicate a site you would use as a template in your environment.
If you wish to migrate a site to a new location, you would have to use Copy Structure instead.
There's a note at the beginning of the article about this, but I made sure to make it more obvious.
Thank you for your feedback.
Is there a reason why this action requires a Tenant admin and not just a SharePoint Admin for SharePoint Online?
Hey Dean,
Good question!
SharePoint Admin can duplicate just a site collection, however you will need to be a Tenant Admin (or Global Admin) to duplicate Office 365 Groups associated to the site collection. For this reason, we recommend that you have that level of permission when executing this action for a SharePoint online/Office 365 site collection.
Hope that helps!
Is there a way to automate this duplication from Microsoft Flow? It could become a valuable method for provisioning a heavy Site Collection.
Thanks,
Jin
Hi Jin,
ShareGate Desktop doesn't work with Flow at this point, but the application does have scheduling built-in so you can apply a bit of automation to your migration tasks.
Hope that helps!
I am trying to duplicate a SC and use the "change the managed path" option. However, I continue to receive an error shortly after the group and SC is created that says:
Cannot migrate Office 365 groups between different managed paths ('/sites' and '/teams'). Please change the selected managed path in the options before migrating or change your default managed path at the destination.
the "help me solve this..." does not resolve to an answer related to the error but goes to the "Cannot connect to the Office Graph" migration error page.
Please Advise - Thanks. Steve
Hello Steve,
Thanks for your comment! I went ahead and forwarded your message to our Support team. They will be able to better advise you on it!
Take care!
Hi Vic - Could you clarify what this means? "The duplicate option is meant to quickly duplicate a site you would use as a template". Does this mean when using the duplicate option it creates another template in the tenant? Is that optional or mandatory?
Hi Robert,
There is no template used or created in the process. What I meant is that using Duplicate site collection is a good option if you have an existing site collection you wish to use as a template.
For example, lets say your company has multiple products, you might want to use the Marketing site collection of one product, and use that site collection as a template for the marketing sites of your other products. In this case, using Duplicate Site Collection is a good option.
If you're moving your site collection to a new location as is, you will most likely benefit from the more complete set of migration options using Copy Structure instead.
Have a great day.
Hello, Support,
is it also possible to select the "Content Database" in which the site collection is duplicated when using this option "Duplicate Site Collections"? I have not found a way to do this.
Thanks for a short info.
Greetings,
Karsten
Hi Karsten,
Duplicate site collection is done in the same location as the original site collection. It is a simplified version of our migration tool to help you replicate a site in your environment. This is good if you wish to use a specific site collection as a template for multiple departments.
If you want to move a site to a new content database or SharePoint environment, you can do so with Copy/Copy structure and content.
I get this error at the first step of duplicating site collection - Unable to create the office 365 group. This might occurs if a group with the same alias was deleted recently. Any thoughts?
There are no recently deleted groups that have similar or same name. To me it feels like it is trying to create the group with the same name as that of the source site but I could be wrong as the error message is not very clear.
Hi Pramod,
I am not certain about the error. I created a request for our support team so they can look into it. They will get back to you as soon as possible.
I see that Duplicate Site Collection will include an Office 365 Group if there is one, but no mention is made of Microsoft Teams, which didn't seem to duplicate.
I will look for a follow-up article on how to duplicate the Microsoft Teams content, but in case I am unable to find one, are there suggestions on how to proceed?
EDIT: I now see that there is a Copy Teams job type and have tested it with acceptable results given the Limitations.
Overall, the intent is just to change the URL of a SharePoint Site that is used by the MS Teams Team, including the managed path (/sites/TeamName1 to /teams/TeamName2).
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