SharePoint 2010 – Restoring a site collection multiple times on the same web app

I got a call from one of my clients Friday trying to do a restore of one of their site collections from their dev to test site, but getting an error everytime they tried to do a restore. I jumped on a webex with them and watched them as they ran the powershell, Restore-SPSite. The command would throw an error – “The operation that you are attempting to perform cannot be completed successfully.  No content databases in the web application were available to store your site collection.  The existing content databases may have reached the maximum number of site collections, or be set to read-only, or be offline, or may already contain a copy of this site collection.  Create another content database for the Web application and then try the operation again”.

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If you happen to come across this error, it is due to the fact that a restore of that site collection has already been done on the existing web application.  The workaround for this is to create a new content database for the web application, and restore the site collection to the new content database.