Recently, I was working in an environment where they wanted to migrate a single list to a new Site Collection. I needed to find the easiest way to do it without using third-party software.
I found that using Export-SPWeb is one of the ways copy list schema and data from one web app to another or one server to another.
One of the reasons I have used this many times is for a list that is in production – copy that list only to a Dev environment to work and develop artifacts for that list like workflow, event handlers etc.
Here is the sample that explains the syntax:
Export-SPWeb -Identity “http://sp.dev/subsite” -ItemUrl “/subsite/lists/List Title here” -path “c:\temp\tempfile.txt”
More Options:
-Identity: full url (absolute) of the site where the list exists
-ItemUrl: relative path of the list from subsite level. Do not forget to include the leading “/”
-path: path of the output file to save the data in. This does not need any extension but I usually give it .txt.
There are lot more additional parameters but above are the minimum for copying a list
To recreate the list in other environment – I used Import-SPWeb command.
I am sure there is of course a lot of better ways to do it, but this is the simple way that I found to do it.