Migrating from Cpanel, verify migration failed, not Cpanel Backup (SOLVED)

Help! (Home for newbies)
1

I’ve closed my cpanel hosting account down, but before I did I made a Home backup. I’ve confirmed I can uncompress the gz file and I have confirmed that I can see all the folders and files.
I am using CentOS 6, and the Virtualmin install went smoothly, but I can’t migrate my cpanel backup because upon verifying after it finishes it tells me that the migration failed because the backup is not a Cpanel backup file.

I’m stuck and I don’t want to build everything from the ground up again, it would take weeks, maybe months.

Help!

2

Seems I was using the wrong backup file, I was using the home one only and should have been using the full backup, only problem is that my full backup is corrupt and the only other one I have is from 2 years ago!!! Which I tested and it migrates fine, now I just have to try to get my current backup from my old host or try to figure out how to repair the tar.gz file of the current one. Argh!

3

Well, nuts!

I don’t imagine the home directory backup includes a backup of your database?

If so, you could always manually create your domain in Virtualmin, then use the home directory backup to populate your files, and then manually import your database.

But if you’re using a database, and that homedir backup doesn’t include it – that won’t help much :slight_smile:

-Eric

4

I do use databases. My websites use Joomla. I have separate backups of the databases and a separate backup of the Home Directory.

I assume that I have to first figure out how to install a fresh copy of joomla then ftp the files over top of the website, and then import the databases. I’ll probably have to figure out how to edit and path changes too.

I wanted to import my emails as well but I’m at a loss with that too. I tried to copy the email files from the home directory over but it didn’t work either.

It’s pretty confusing to know where to put stuff in virtuamin vs cpanel file path structures.

This is proving farmore challenging then I’d like. My sites been down almost two months now and every additional day its offline because I can’t easily navigate virtualmin is even more frustating. I’m not a web designer or a server administration. Just trying to make it work with the limited experience and knowledge I do have.

5

This is proving farmore challenging then I’d like

Well, ideally, you’d be performing this migration while your old sites were still live… then, when things don’t work – your sites are still online, and you can take the time you need to troubleshoot the problems at hand. And in your case, since you don’t have a full backup – you’d be able to generate the full backup required in order to perform a migration.

A migration of a full backup from cPanel will migrate everything for you – website, database, dns, email, and so forth.

However, without a full backup – you’ll have to do a lot of work manually… that can be difficult and time consuming. We’ll do our best to offer some suggestions for how to make that work though!

I have separate backups of the databases

What you can do here is create the correct databases on your new server, and then manually import your database backups.

You can do that import from within phpMyAdmin, or by going into Edit Databases -> Manage -> Execute SQL -> Run SQL from file.

I wanted to import my emails as well but I’m at a loss with that too. I tried to copy the email files from the home directory over but it didn’t work either.

On a default installation of a new server running Virtualmin, it would be looking for email in the maildir format, and it would be located in the directory $HOME/Maildir.

If your email isn’t in maildir format, you’ll need to convert it. Note that during the migration using a full backup from cPanel, that would be converted for you. So, if there’s anything at all that can be done to obtain a full backup file, that would save you a bundle of time :slight_smile:

-Eric

6

Thanks for your help Eric

After my miserably failed attempts at importing, I decided to give it a go manually, and I’m pleased to say that after 2 days of chipping away at it, I finally got my emails and website back online. I’ve had to make a bunch of minor tweaks to get it working but I’m happy with the results so far.

Most challenges I ran into were related to having to tweak Joomla config files, not Virtualmin.

I had to increase the maximum packet size for the MySQL database tables to transfer over ok.

I still have some things to iron out, to be announced under other threads :slight_smile:

7

Eric,

I’m responding to this because I have a similar problem, except my website and content is still up and running at my current host (justhost.com) and after trying to get a good cPanel backup for some 4 or 5 times now, I cannot seem to get one that Virtualmin likes. For starters, justhost only offers me a .tar or .zip download. The first one that I got from them I could expand with winrar just fine and look at everything that was in there, yet Virtualmin said unexpected end of archive and this is not a cPanel backup.

I contacted Justhost chat support and they told me that there was a problem with the cPanel full backup in the version that they were running. Have you ever heard anything about that?

8

Howdy – hmm, I hadn’t heard of a problem with cPanel full backups before.

But I have seem the error you’re describing there before… if the archive is indeed somehow corrupted, even in a minor way, tar will throw an error when untarring it, which causes Virtualmin to fail to use it – even if it can technically be unrar’d.

I’d be curious what the output of this command is:

tar tzvf backup.tar >/dev/null

That should ignore all standard output, and only show errors and warnings.