SSH - Backup / Move a Website

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Moving my website or backing up my entire website is something I do often. If you've never attempted to move or backup your site before you might want to find out if your web host supports SSH / Telnet.

Without it, moving (or restoring from a backup file of) your entire website including webpages, scripts and mysql databases is going to be a nightmare! Also, I am assuming that you're on a *nix / Apache server.

Just to give you an idea, it usually takes me just about 15 minutes to move my website.

SSH Secure Shell login

code:

cd public_html

or it could be -

code:

cd htdocs

depending on the structure of your webserver.

Hit Enter and you should be in your WWW root where your web pages reside.

If you want to be certain that you're in the right folder, just type

code:

ls

hit Enter, and you should be able to see all your web pages and folders listed. Once you're certain you're in the right directory / folder, you can proceed to create the backup file of website or tarball (compressed file) of your entire* website.

Create a tarball

Now, you will want to type in a command that will collect all these files and folders, and compress them into one little file - a tarball.

Type

code:

tar -cpzf filename.tar.gz *

hit Enter. Using your domain name as a filename is a good idea, I think. So what I usually do is something like this:

code:

tar -cpzf desilvabiz.tar.gz *

but, the filename you set for yourself COULD be anything!

Within seconds, it should be done and now you can either download this file through your regular browser by just pointing to it; i.e. http://www.desilva.biz/desilvabiz.tar.gz or 'get' it using a regular FTP program from your webserver just like you would any web page, image file or script off your webserver previously.

Since I am trying to move my website, I have no need for this file on my HDD, so I will usually skip downloading it altogether.

As soon as I have finished creating my backup and compressed it into a tarball on my old server, it is time to log into the new server.

SSH Login at your NEW webserver

Chances are, you don't have a domain name to go to, right? So to get to your new webserver you should use the IP address that came with the account details of your new webhost. e.g.:

code:

putty -ssh 64.191.5.105

As you can see, I use PuTTY to handle all my SSH work, you could use anything really but PuTTY is FREE. Login with your username and password and get to your WWW root or
path: /home/username/public_html
folder as described in the previous page.

Wget

Don't worry if you don't know what 'wget' is - as soon as you try it out once, you will quickly figure it out - and it might even give you some other ideas for it's uses.

If your host does not have this feature (wget) installed - look for another host! That's all I can say...

Remember, you have to be at
path: /home/username/public_html
before you do any of the following!

Now, type

code:

wget http://www.old_host.com/~username/desilvabiz.tar.gz

and hit Enter ... and unleash the magic! Yeah, it's magic if you have dialup to work with (like me) and your website is reasonably large!

What did you just do? Well, you just moved your tarball off your old web host, directly to your new web host, without having to download anything onto your PC! You also did that at speeds that you probably could not match through your 56k modem!

Extracting the tarball

Once the file has completed it's transfer to your new web server, it's time to extract the tarball (uncompress the file). Just like compressing, uncompressing is also done in one line!

Type

code: