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I think the answer probably lies in the RewriteCond immediate before this RewriteRule.

That said, are you using Admin Tools' .htaccess Maker? If so, during restoration you are supposed to set .htaccess Handling to Use Default when transferring to a different domain / subdomain / subdirectory. On the restored site go to the administrator area, Components, Admin Tools, .htaccess Maker, scroll all the way down and edit the domain and path to match the new site, then Save & Create .htaccess.

Can you please ZIP and attach your .htaccess file? The line itself does a redirection. I want to see what is the RewriteCond line which tells Apache when to do the redirection prescribed in the RewriteRule line.

I will have to insist with my previous instructions.

On the restored site go to the administrator area, Components, Admin Tools, .htaccess Maker, scroll all the way down and edit the domain and path to match the new site (test.guillenphoto.com), then Save & Create .htaccess.

Lines 34 to 36 should now read

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} =http
RewriteRule .* https://test.guillenphoto.com%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

These lines say that when your site is not being accessed over HTTPS it will redirect you to the HTTPS URL of the site.

You will definitely need to completely close down your browser and then restart it after making this change. Otherwise the browser "remembers" the previous (wrong) redirection.

Well, your problem is not the line you are telling me you are modifying. Let's see what happens:

$ wget "test.guillenphoto.com" -O /dev/null
--2023-01-20 19:18:14--  http://test.guillenphoto.com/
Resolving test.guillenphoto.com (test.guillenphoto.com)... 128.65.195.87
Connecting to test.guillenphoto.com (test.guillenphoto.com)|128.65.195.87|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
Location: https://test.guillenphoto.com/ [following]
--2023-01-20 19:18:15--  https://test.guillenphoto.com/
Connecting to test.guillenphoto.com (test.guillenphoto.com)|128.65.195.87|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
Location: https://test.guillenphoto.com/en/ [following]
--2023-01-20 19:18:15--  https://test.guillenphoto.com/en/
Reusing existing connection to test.guillenphoto.com:443.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden
2023-01-20 19:18:15 ERROR 403: Forbidden.

The first bold part is what these lines do, they take you to the HTTPS site. This works.

The second bold part is Joomla itself redirecting the home page URL to the English language URL (/en).

This, leads to the 403 (third bold part) because the server does not honour the last six lines of the .htaccess file.

Try replacing the entire contents of the .htaccess file with those from Joomla's htaccess.txt file. If the problem persists, something's wrong with the server. If this, however, fixed the problem you have go to the .htaccess Maker and set “HSTS Header (for HTTPS-only sites)” to No and “Disable directory listings (recommended)” to No. Then regenerate the .htaccess file.

At this point you need to ask your host. This is not a problem I can reproduce locally with the settings you have used, and I'm out of educated guesses as to what may be going on.

I am leaving your ticket in a pending state (meaning that it's not closed, just waiting feedback from you). It will remain like that for at least one calendar month so you can get back to it with more information if need be.

I have an inkling of what might be happening and your host can probably confirm it.

Normally, any change to the .htaccess file is applied immediately. That's how Apache and LiteSpeed, the two web servers which support .htaccess files, are supposed to work.

However, this also means that every time your server needs to serve any file —be it a .php file like Joomla itself, or a static file like CSS, JavaScript, or an image— the web server needs to look for .htaccess files from the file's path all the way to the web root, parse them, and decide what to do with the request. On crowded, cheap hosting this might lead to performance issue.

So, we've seen a small number of hosts actually having .htaccess files disabled but periodically run a script which reads these files and modifies the site's configuration. This happens anywhere from once ever 15 minutes to once every day. Any changes made between successive runs of the script are not taken into account.

If your host is doing this it would explain why your previous changes had zero effect (which made no sense to either of us!), but “magically” it all worked fine today. The changes we made did have the desired and expected effect, it's just that they did not take effect until several hours later.