Recently one of our clients wanted to update their staging environment with the content from live so they could test with up to real content. Having done this before I thought this would be an easy job, however I found a slight issue with the restore process.

When performing the back up one of the parameters allows you to specify if you are exporting from AD/AM. What the documentation doesn't tell you is you also have to specify this when you are trying to restore the back up. If you don't include this you get an extremely unhelpful 'Index out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the size of the collection' error.

I spent a good while checking the command, checking the XML that was generated, changing the parameters to try and identify what section was causing the problem until I double checked the command line help and spotted the /ADAM parameter. Initially I didn't think this would be the issue as I assumed that there would be a more helpful error message if you missed out the switch but no as soon as I added this everything worked fine.

Hopefully this will save you some time if you encounter this problem.