I am in catch-up mode on some blog posts, and this one belongs to what D’Arcy Norman termed the outboard brain genre of post. I was migrating a WordPress site from another hosting service a couple of weeks back, and it was a beefy 10 GBS (which was more storage then the new account on Reclaim even had). The fact it was so big raised a flag for me, so I looked around in wp-content, and it turns out the backup plugin Updraft had stored a couple of years worth of regular backup files. If the hosting service had anything resembling File Manager in cPanel I could have moved them out temporarily, and then zipped up the files and moved it over, but turns out I was doing this via command line so I need to exclude the Updraft directory from a zip archive.
A quick search brought me to this post on OSXDaily and I was able to exclude the backups directory and transfer a 350MB file versus wrestling with a 10GB monster , which saved me a tremendous amount of time and frustration, as well as back and forth tickets with the lient:
zip -r wpsite2bemoved.com.zip wpsite2bemoved.com.com -x *updraft*
Now that I had a manageable zip archive, I was able to use the scp command, which is very useful, to transfer the zip archive between servers almost instantly:
scp wpsite2bemoved.com.zip [email protected]:/home/wpsitebe/public_html
So, now I have the process more formally documented then an open tab in a browser I would eventually lose to time and memory. I could have just deleted the backups folder, I guess, but when you have gotten called on the carpet for deleting anything as much as we have, that become the absolute last resort.
