Back up and restore issues

[jamison]

I have a new client who wants us to transfer her word press site with shopping cart from another Linux hosting company to ours. I accessed their CPanel and did a home back up and downloaded it. I created a new account and used the home restore feature on the the new Cpanel to upload the the data. I did not use fantastico to create word press on the new hosting account as I thought the restore would cover all that. I now have 74 megs of space on the new hosting account, but no files in the public html folder and the data bases don't look right. Anybody have any ideas on where I screwed up?
Thank for your help.

[Alexander]

First of all, I'd like to thank you for posting this question here and helping us continue building our KB. We hope that this post will be useful for resellers, dedicated servers and VPS web hosting clients.

Usually we recommend our clients to use Download or Generate a Full Web Site Backup in Cpanel. This allows to create a full backup of a cPanel account which you would like to transfer. It will include MySQL DBs, emails, email accounts, webfolder and the rest of your data. That is, everything is backed up.

After downloading it to your computer, you'll need to upload it to our server and request restoration of this backup via our Helpdesk. (if you have a dedicated server or VPS, you can do this by yourself).

Please, note, that if account with the same username exists on the server, it needs to be removed first. So make sure that you don't create a cPanel account on the target server, uploading the backup is enough, and the restoration scripts will handle the account creation process before unpacking the rest of the account.

But if you came so far and still have errors, I'd check root folder of that account. I can bet that the files you restored are there. It is hard to say what went wrong, but in this case you'll need to copy files to public_html folder manually.

After that, transfer and restore DBs, adjust path settings and other. Lots of work I guess, but the sometimes that is just cPanel for you. It tries its best and saves a lot of work for all of us, but sometimes being a human is the only way to fix a botched backup. many times the old host has a poorly configured system and the backups may be corrupted or any other number of issues.

We strongly recommend to use the method described above. This should save you a lot of time.