If
you have a Windows computer, download a program called "PuTTY" which
you can use to login in your web host's shell. Search for "putty ssh"
on Google or get it here: http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/latest/x86/putty.exe
Open up PuTTY and at the top type in your hostname (your web site
address without the http or www, just "yourname.com"). Your web host
either uses SSH or telnet, first try logging in using SSH and if it
won't connect try it using Telnet. Click the "Open" button at the
bottom to connect.
When it connects you will be asked for your account's username, and
after you enter that, it will ask for your password. If these both
take, you'll see a command prompt of sorts. What you have to do is
browse to the document root, depending on your host it's usually a
folder like "public_html" or "wwwroot".
If the wwwroot or public_html folder has more folders inside of it,
in the form of yourdomain.com, don't browse into them yet, just stay
in the folder you're in.
Browsing in the Unix command prompt is just like DOS, to view a folder
type "dir" or "ls", and to go into a certain folder type "cd foldername".
If you messed up you can type "cd .." to move up one level.
STEP 2: BACK-UP THE DATABASE
The first step if you're backing up a site is to dump your mySQL database.
To do this obviously you need the mySQL username and password you
want to back up. If your mySQL username is "myuser" and the mySQL
password is "mypassword", you'd type:
mysqldump -umyuser -pmypassword -A > dump.sql
mysqldump is the program we run to dump the database into a file,
then we type "-u" followed by the username (no spaces) and "-p" followed
by the password (also no spaces). The uppercase "-A" tells the program
we want to dump every database this user has access to. It MUST be
an uppercase A.
The ">" afterwards says we want to put this program's output into
a file (otherwise it would show up on the screen) and "dump.sql" is
the name of the file we're going to dump to.
This may take a while depending on the size of your database. Be patient.
Once you have a command prompt again, it's done.
STEP 3: BACK-UP YOUR FILES
Now you can put everything into one big file, which you can easily
move over to the new host in one go, instead of one at a time. Unix
doesn't let you create Zip files, but you can create a TAR (Tape Archive)
which just rolls a bunch of files together without any sort of compression.
To create your TAR archive, type:
tar -cvf dump.tar *
The "-c" tells the program to create a new TAR archive, the "v" following
right after says to be verbose, in other words, give us the name of
every file that's being added to the archive. "f: means we're saving
this to a file, as opposed to showing it on the screen (you'd just
see junk).
"dump.tar" is the name of the file we want to save into, and the "*"
means we want to put everything into this TAR archive -- files, folders,
everything.
You may get some sort of warning about not adding dump.tar to the
archive, that's no big deal because we don't want this file to add
itself.
Your files are backed up. At this point it's time to move things over
to the next host. There's a way we can do this without you having
to download the whole thing, and re-upload it.
STEP 4: ARRANGE YOUR FILE FOR PICKUP
Remember how I said when you were in "wwwroot" or "public_html" not
to browse into the folder containing a domain name? Well now it's
time to move that dump over into one of them so it can be picked up.
If one of your folders is, say, yourdomain.com, type:
mv dump.tar yourdomain.com
This moves "dump.tar" into the folder "yourdomain.com".
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STEP 5: MOVE THE NEW FILE OVER
Login to your new host. Browse to its "wwwroot" or "public_html" folder.
Most hosts include a program called "wget" which works sort of like
a browser in that you give it a URL to pick-up that it loads. Only
this browser also saves the file you want to load.
If your old host was at yourdomain.com, you'd just type:
wget http://www.yourdomain.com/dump.tar
This will load that URL and save it as "dump.tar". You'll probably
see some sort of progress indicator as it goes.
STEP 6: DECOMPRESSING THE FILE
Once you have the file, you use that same TAR program to decompress
it. Type:
tar -xvf test.tar
The "v" and "f" are still there, but instead of "c" (create) we use
"x" (extract). This will unpack each file and let us know which one
it's working on.
STEP 7: RESTORING THE MYSQL DATABASE
Before you can put the mySQL dump back into the database, you have
to go into this new web host's control panel and create blank databases
with the same names as you had before.
You also have to create a mySQL user and make sure that user has access
to all those databases you've created.
Once that's done find the dump.sql that was unpacked with all of the
other files.
Instead of using the program "mysqldump" to dump the files, we use
the program "mysql" which let's us put commands into the database.
That's basically what a dump is, a file full of commands that, when
run, will recreate the old database exactly.
This time we don't type in the database name right away. To get into
mySQL from the command prompt, type:
mysql -umyuser -pmypassword
Where "myuser" and "mypassword" are your mySQL username and password.
Once you're in you'll get kind of a weird looking prompt. All you
have to do at this point is type:
source dump.sql
This says, open up the file dump.sql, read through it and do whatever
it says to do in that file. You will see a bunch of lines telling
you a command has been entered (0 Rows Affected, 1 Rows Affected,
something like that).
If everything goes smoothly, type "quit" and you will be back in the
shell.
You've just moved one site (or a bunch of sites) over from one host
to another in about 5 minutes.
About the Author:
Article by Robert Plank
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