Better than Updraft

Where updraft was dropping the ball several times (skipping several days between scheduled daily backups, corrupted backups that were totally useless), I’ve never had any major issues with duplicator. Some url’s may not update correctly and you may come across a redirect to old URL for admin login every now and then, but this is usually easily resolved. It would be nice if they included a little tool to fix this automatically or explain the procedures for first time users that run into these minor issues as this seems to be a reason for some people to rate this great tool 1 star.

• If you’re on a cheap charlie shared host, then don’t blame the developer if it doesn’t work. This tool requires memory, permissions and processing power to run properly and is therefore limited by the host.
• If you use some plugin that customizes the login URL – then turn it off before you duplicate
• If you hard coded the site url in config.php – then change it manually after you moved the site or create a line to set it for the new one
• If you have redirects set in your .htaccess file – rename it to .htaccessbak and create a new one from the admin panel under permalinks section after migration
• Always run a search and replace tool such as velvet to check if there are any old URL’s that need to be replaced after migration
• If you have SSL enabled on you source, then make sure to generate a new keypair for the migrated site and it doesn’t hurt to replace the salt keys either to make sure you’re not redirected because of some caching.

These steps have always worked for me and hopefully they’ll be of use for someone else as well.