How do I restore from Plesk 8.3 to Plesk 8.1?
I have a client with a large amount of e-mail. I don't want to have them lose e-mail.
What happened was I moved them from a host with 8.1.1 to a host with 8.3. The host with 8.3 is unsatisfactory. I want them back on the host with 8.1.1. How can I do this?
On a different client, I tried this, and the backup manager said the backup file I uploaded wasn't a valid backup file.
Depending on your local situation (mysql version on each host, php version on each host etc etc) there is a gloriously simple way to accomplish what you want which would be version agnostic.
QMAIL
Disable mail on the domain on both the source and target boxes (or kill qmail completely, on both - again, depending on what/who is living on the 2 servers)
get yourself to the command line, become root and fire up "mc" on the target box ("mc" has to be a gift from the command line gods for simplicity combined with functionality) Connect via ssh to the source box.
Carefully copy over (directory by directory and carefully) /var/qmail/mailnames/<domain_name>/<username>Maildir/*
BEWARE however, because each directory in there (including .sent) will have a "new" and a "cur", you need to copy the contents of each directory to it's equivalent on the old host. It's tedious, but it does work!
Startup qmail (and/or enable mail for the domain) on both ends.
WEB CONTENT
tarball the httpdocs (and/or httpsdocs) and scp 'em to the target host. Unpack as required, adjust ownership as required, add Worcester sauce to taste, stir and serve.
Depending on whether you need logs and whether or not you have webstat/awstats enabled, you may need to copy over statistics and logfiles.
MYSQL CONTENT
mysql dump
scp dump to target host
create db with same db_name/db_pass as the old box
fire up phpmyadmin and restore the dump
That takes care of most situations, although what other apps you have running on both boxes is of course unknown. You
might have to do a bit of tweaking, but at least you will have stepped backwards to the earlier version and migrated the pure content over. It's messy, I'm not denying that. If there's any significant number of sites/users it's going to get messier still, and under those circumstances you might want to write a shell script to copy over content to the target.
Good Luck
Regards & HTH,
/porky
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