PointBeyond

If you get an access denied error when using stsadm -o import to import a backup of a site collection, chances are either it is because the windows account you are logged on as doesn’t have sufficient access to either overwrite the existing site collection (solve this by making the account a site collection admin of the old site), or because the account doesn’t have sufficient access to the SQL Server database (I solved this by temporarily making the account a database administrator, then removing this afterwards).