Sometimes Restore-SPSite does not correctly report the problem. In my case I found out the database schemas do not match. You can goto Central Admin to confirm the server you backed up from and the server you’re restoring to.
I went ahead and made a powershell script to pull the data I needed.
one thing to note. it seems like there’s a bug on the output of SchemaVersionXml. the xml that’s returned does not close correctly. I’ve added a regular expression line to fix this problem. I’ll notify Microsoft of this.
Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell; $response = @{}; $response.success=$true; $response.message=""; $contentdbs = Get-SPContentDatabase; $hitList = @(); foreach($contentdb in $contentdbs) { $schema = $contentdb.SchemaVersionXml; $schema = $schema -ireplace '$', ' '; $schema = [xml]$schema; foreach($SchemaVersion in $schema.SchemaVersions.SchemaVersion) { $attributes = $SchemaVersion.Attributes; $target = @{}; $target.ContentDatabase = $contentdb.Name; foreach ($attribute in $attributes) { $target[$attribute.Name] = $attribute.'#text'; } $hitList += $target; } } $response.data = $hitList; $response | ConvertTo-Json