I ran into a strange error message trying to restore a backup to a new SharePoint server. One of our developers send us a backup to restore on a dev server to test. So I ran stsadm –o restore ….. but got the following error message "Your backup is from a different version of Windows SharePoint Services and cannot be restored to a server running the current version.  The backup file should be restored to a server with version '1162887508.196608.17694860.0′ or later." This error really got me puzzled. I have done 100s of restore in the past but never ran into this particular

After a few search on-line, I found some hint to my problem. I realized that the backup I had in my hands wasn't a stsadm backup but SQL backup instead. I restore the backup using SQL manager and attach the content database and all worked as expected.

Lesson learned today, always question the quality of the error message thrown at you. This message should have been "Unknown backup