Changed web hosts

I have recently changed webhosts for the first time. Backing up my admittedly small website and moving to the new host was theoretically as simple as doing a backup on my old host, then restoring to the new host. Things in IT are never that easy, and this was no exception.

The restore seemed to restore all my files, but mail, wordpress and phpgedview didn’t work. I decided I didn’t care about mail – I have local backups, and don’t want to mess up mail I have received since I moved to the new host. I also am happy to rebuild phpgedview, but I did want to restore this wordpress blog.
First off, I couldn’t create a database with the same name as the old host, since my new host forces a different naming convention. I believe I could have modified the database script, but didn’t out of fear. I paid my host to change my user id instead, so the default became the same as the original host.
Next I extracted just the database backup from the gzip archive downloaded from my old host.

Restoring this in its native form didn’t seem to do anything, so I rezipped it then tried a restore. This looked like it worked – presenting all the sql scripts on the browser as it unpacked. However it didn’t achieve anything. Next I tried downloading the pretty much empty MYSQL database I had created on the new host, made a small change, then uploaded it again. The change worked – the subtitle of the wordpress blog had been modified.
Hmmm.
Realistically, changing the name of the old host’s archive to that of the archive just downloaded shouldn’t work – it’s ridiculous to think that the restore of an archive is dependent on the name of the zipped file. But hey, I’m semi desperate. Just a waste of time one would think. Really.

Anyway, I took the extracted MYSQL part of the old hosts backup archive, and zipped it into an archive with the same name as the MYSQL backup that I had just downloaded from the new host, then uploaded it.

It worked. Go figure.

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