Credits: Video Training produced by Brian Teeman
Transcript of this course
A backup of your web site is only useful if you can restore it perhaps you need to change your web host or even move the site from a development server to a live server.
To begin with take a brand new backup of your web site.
Once the backup is complete go to Manage Backups and download the backup file to your computer.
Now we've downloaded the backup file we need an additional program called Kickstart which you can find at the akeebabackup.com web site.
Go to download.
You will find the akeeba kickstart here in the backup section.
Kickstart is a standalone program.
Click download to download the file to your computer.
Here we can see that the Kickstart program is a zip file and we need to extract that.
We can see we now have a new folder with all the kickstart files in.
The only one that you actually need is the kickstart.php file all the rest are language translations.
We now need to transfer the kickstart.php and our backup to our brand new web host To do that we will use a FTP program.
I am going to use filezilla but you can use any ftp program that you like.
To begin with connect to your new server.
Once connected make sure you are in the public html or the web root of your server.
Now you need to transfer the backup file from our local computer to our live server.
I am just going to pick that up and drag it across.
We now need to take that kickstart.php file and do exactly the same thing.
Select it and drag it across.
That's it with the filezilla for now so let's go back to our web browser and go to our brand new web site.
As you can see I have a holding page in place to show that the web site is coming soon.
So just go to the special url for kickstart.php The kickstart program is now running.
Kickstart is NOT an installation program it is a special archive extraction tool.
Click here to remove this message and we can see that it has detected the archive file.
We have several methods of extracting the files On most good web hosts we can use the hybrid method.
Finally click START to begin the extract process.
kickstart has now extracted the backup file and provides a link to the installer that was built in to the backup.
The installer is a very simple process we begin with the required settings as you can see they are all set to yes If any are set to No you wont be able to proceed and you need to speak to your web hosts to rectify the errors.
We can now click Next I now need to enter the database connection details that I have got from my web host.
Enter the server hostname which is usually localhost but that may depend on your hosting and your DATABASE username and password.
And finally the database name that you want to install your web site on.
This is something that your host will have provided to you or you will have set up yourself within your hosts control panel.
And click next.
The restoration process of the database has now completed and we can click to continue.
We have now have the opportunity if we wish to change the site name and the web site address in most cases when you are restoring a site you won't need to do this.
There is also the opportunity to change the password and email address of the Super User.
Finally click Next again.
The installer has recognised that we are installing this backup onto not only a new server but a new domain.
and is suggesting that it replaces all the references to the old domain which can be found on the left hand side with the new domain which can be found on the right hand side.
If that's all correct and it usally is just click next.
The sites configuration has all been setup Close this window to return to the Kickstart program and click on cleanup.
This will remove the kickstart.php file and that big backup archive from your web space.
Now that we're done we can visit our web site and here we can see that the web site has now been transferred from our old hosting account to our new one.