All,
My first VPS provider was, to be polite, worse than inept. They were down for 36 hours yesterday (and regular outages seem to be the norm), so I decided to move to another provider. Since I had been creating daily backups, I though this would be easy. It wasn’t. It is quite possible that my challenges were do to lack of knowledge, but in the off chance that anyone else needs to move to another server, this posting may (hopefully) be of some value.
Without any specific rationale for the ordering, here are some of the issues into which I ran:
User ID/Group ID: The numbers assigned to the users changed when the system was restored. However, the values assigned to the files/directories stayed the same.
non-domain users: I created a non-domain user for performing backup. This user and this user’s files were not saved. Also, files in /root were not saved.
Databases: mySql databases associated with applications (specifically drupal and horde) were not saved. Lesson learned - run regular mySql backups of your user databases.
Horde installation: Since my site has but a single virtual server, I installed Horde into /public_html. However, the installation process also created a bunch of files in /usr/share/pear which I had to manually copy over.
saslauthd: To use user@domain, the file /etc/sysconfig/saslauthd needs FLAGS=-r (thanks andreychek!) and this was not saved
certificates: Security certificates in folder (forgot which) were not saved and had to be copied over
webmail: The virtual domain tld/webmail was not preserved and had to be recreated
system apps: System wide applications, for example, Jed, were not saved and had to be reinstalled. Lesson learned - keep a list of these someplace handy
There may have been other issues, but I cannot recall them now. (I seem to recall having to tweak a couple of things in /etc and/or /etc/init.d)
