Forum Discussion
Sharepoint Online - Site backup / export
- Third party tool is the best way to go...taking into account you might be exporting a small site in size, you could try to see if using a trial tool is enough for you even I recommend you to invest some money here (Sharegate and Metalogix are cood choices)
Microsoft
Can you explain what specifically you need to move down, into an on-premises environment, for testing? A few thoughts.
1. If it's customizations that you're testing, backup/restore isn't really a true dev pattern. Start thinking about building/deploying your customizations via DevOps models. Build the customization, and then deploy it, where ever it needs to go. Yes, I know this is more work, but it is the proper way to build/test/deploy customizations.
2. SPO and SP Server are different products, although very similar. Moving between the two for testing purposes may create hidden issues, or have compatibility issues. (That's likely why there are no back/restore PowerShell commandlets that work between the two)
3. Moving content (documents) generally isn't necessary for testing purposes. Consider that, if/when you leverage a 3rd party migration tool.