Question Regarding cPanel Backup Feature

[nootkan]

I have a new client who wants her websites migrated over to my new Alma Linux 8 64 bit server.

Was looking at the backup feature and am a little confused how it works exactly.

Read through the document at Backup for cPanel | cPanel & WHM Documentation and this line concerns me: "You cannot use a full backup file to restore your website through the cPanel interface. Contact your hosting provider for assistance."

Does this mean that I cannot login to her cPanel account on a different hosts server, do a full backup and than use the tar.zip file to add her website to my new server? If so, how is this usually done without using sftp as her account is fairly large and would take all day with sftp. Thanks in advance for your advice.

 

[quietFinn]

Does this mean that I cannot login to her cPanel account on a different hosts server, do a full backup and than use the tar.zip file to add her website to my new server? If so, how is this usually done without using sftp as her account is fairly large and would take all day with sftp. Thanks in advance for your advice.

You can, but the restore you must do as root, not as cPanel user.

 

[GOT]

Log in to the cPanel account on the existing hosting and create a full backup. it will put this in their home folder. Then move that backup file using the file manager into their public_html folder. Then on your server you can use wget to download that backup file to your server and then you can restore that backup using your WHM as root.

 

[rbairwell]

Just remember that the "user is unable to restore from full backup" restriction is there for a reason: the full backup file contains lots of configuration data (such as maximum SQL dbs, max transfer, reseller configuration, DNS zone configurations etc etc) and it is feasible for someone to manually edit the backup file before giving you access to it to restore. I'm uncertain how much "damage" could be done (I hope there is no way they would be able to set themselves as root), but just something to bare in mind if you do not have control over both servers.

In your situation, I would probably create the new account on your server, login as "her" on the server and then "rsync" the public_html/ contents from the old server to yours (if it gets interrupted, you can restart it and it should skip completed files). Once that's been done once, generate a MySQL backup from the remote server (or use the MySQL command line tool to do so), copy and restore that and then do one last sync and it should be quite up to date. I don't think there is a way you could setup proxy/redirection from the old account to the new one (with the exception of standard HTTP redirects to a temporary domain name) if you don't have root on the old server.

 

[nootkan]

Thanks rbairwell, I ended up making a backup from the cPanel account of the original server saved it to my computer and than uploaded (12hrs) to my new server and ran the file transfer tool. Everything went well except for the time lost while uploading via sftp.

Thanks everyone for your replies and advice much appreciated.