Restoring a Backup vs Migration – significant limitations?

  • A friend uses the (free version) of UpdraftPlus for backup – his (shared) server recently suffered a catastrophic failure so’s he asked if I could lend him a temporary place to continue working pending his server being properly restored.

    Problem: his old site was based at a URL he doesn’t control so the site we’re restoring has a different URL to the old. Updraftplus believes we are not recovering but ‘migrating’ – which is technically true BUT we’re not worried about links and other references being wrong, we just want to check the site is safely backed-up/have a safe-place to store work in the meanwhile.

    If Updraft WITHOUT the migrator/premium is limited to restoring to an IDENTICAL WordPress URL (as it appears to be) it would be nice to make that clearer BEFORE people commit their backups to it perhaps??

    It seems to imply it MIGHT work but it absolutely doesn’t so – erm – ideas?

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  • Thread Starter johnpeat

    (@johnpeat)

    I’ve looked further into this and our first recovery seems to have failed due to a disk-space issue – not sure why, there’s no lack of space so I decided to just retry it.

    The 2nd attempt failed with what I guessed was PHP version difference/issue (yes, we got that warning) so I fixed that and…

    The 3rd attempt completed without error!

    I editted the database to correct the site URL and it seems to be fine – which is awesome!

    The message you get when recovering to a different URL is worrying tho

    “This backup set is from a different site – this is not a restoration, but a migration. You need the Migrator add-on in order to make this work.

    You can search and replace your database (for migrating a website to a new location/URL) with the Migrator add-on – follow this link for more information”

    I get that it’s technically “migration” when the site URL changes but there are MANY cases where the domain and physical location of a site may differ (esp during system recovery)

    I’d still expect restoration to work, abeit that I need to do some work to make the site available. – maybe it should say something like

    “You are changing URL – for the site to work you will need to correct the site URL in the database manually OR you can use our amazing Migration Plugin which will do that for you as well as search/replace links and references and lots, lots more – click here for details”

    That’s my 10p – thanks for working tho!!

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