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Site Restoration

#11135 Using Akeeba for "warm backup"

Posted in ‘Site restoration’
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Environment Information

PHP version
n/a
CMS Type
Other
CMS Version
n/a
Backup Tool Version
n/a
Kickstart version
n/a

Latest post by nicholas on Friday, 17 February 2012 04:38 CST

Friday, 17 February 2012 03:53 CST

user47446
Mandatory information about my setup:

Have I read the related troubleshooter articles above before posting (which pages?)? Yes

Have I searched the tickets before posting? Yes
Have I read the documentation before posting (which pages?)?
Joomla! version: 1.7
PHP version: 5
MySQL version: (unknown)
Host: hostgator
Akeeba Backup version which took the backup: 3.3.7 Pro
Kickstart version used to extract the backup: (unknown)

Description of my question (it is not a issue):

I would like to have 2 sites: one would be the backup of the other one.
The 1st one is not yet active but will be soon (it has a ~userName in it for the moment).
The 2nd one will not be active, but should be used as warm backup (if there is any issue I want to switch the DNS and a few hours later, the site will be up).
I have done the backup of the 1st site, copied the jpa file on the 2nd site as well as the kickstart (it looks like that hosgator does not allow the transfer site...).
When starting kikstart.php, I read the following "Trying to restore to the temporary URL of a cPanel host (e.g. http://1.2.3.4/~username) will lead to restoration failure and your site will appear to be not working. ". I have "googled" it to find more information but could not find anything relevant.

Could you please explain exactly what do you mean? Does it apply in my case?

Thank you in advance for your answer.

Kind regards
Dominique

Friday, 17 February 2012 04:38 CST

nicholas
Hello Dominique,

It is possible that trying to restore your site on a temporary URL (of the http://www.example.com/~username format) might cause some issues, like:
- Kickstart not being able to extract the backup (rare)
- The database restoration throwing AJAX errors (not very often)
- The SEF URLs not working on the restored site (extremely likely)
For these reasons, we have to warn you against doing that. One viable workaround that I've found is assigning a "spare" domain name to the account, perform the restoration, test everything, then remove the "spare" domain name from the account. When I say "spare" domain name I mean one of the several domain names I've registered but not using for a live site yet (I have two dozens of them, I bet every web professional has quite a few of them).

Of course, you can try going through with the restoration. If no problems occur, you're lucky and don't have to do anything special! If problems do occur, please follow my advice on using a spare domain name; it's well-tested.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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