Question

New Droplet with Backup from other Host (e.g. Media Temple)

Posted on July 7, 2016
Deployment DigitalOcean Ubuntu
Asked by Matthew Maddux

We’ve got a few sites that were created and managed by an outside firm and are each on a Media Temple VPS. We’d like to manage them ourselves on Digital Ocean. I know we could manually move sites over to newly created droplets, but I’m wondering if there is an easy way to make up backup at Media Temple (I don’t currently have access to that account as it’s managed by them) and create new droplets with those images, then just point the nameservers to DO, set up DNS and we’re done.

Or I saw somebody on another thread mention the possibility of using rsync to copy the whole file system (assuming they’re both running the same distro/version). Anybody done that before?

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Ryan Quinn

DigitalOcean Employee

• July 7, 2016

Accepted Answer

We do not currently provide a method to import or export disk images or backups. The two methods you mentioned (manual or rsync) would be viable options. If you choose to use rsync to do the transfer it may be easier to only transfer specific directories rather than the full filesystem. What software and services are you running on your current VPS?

Jonathan Tittle • July 7, 2016

@mattmaddux

Using rysnc is one way, if you have SSH access, though without it, you wouldn’t be able to use it. As the websites are being managed by a third-party, I would simply ask them to create a backup of each website and provide them for download. From there, you could simply use wget to pull the backups from the URL provided to the Droplet and then extract each archive, move the data to each preferred directory and ensure that proper permissions are setup (i.e. you don’t want to run accounts under root, each account should be ran as its own user).

Using wget from your Droplet is as simple as:

wget http://domain.ext/backup.tar.gz

Then, create a few home directories, one for each account:

mkdir -p /home/username/{public_html,logs,private}

Download the archive:

cd /home/username/public_html \
&& wget http://domain.ext/backup.tar.gz

Extract the Archive:

cd /home/username/public_html \
&& tar xzf --strip-components=1 backup.tar.gz

Then, to ensure proper permissions, create a new user:

useradd -d /home/username username

Then chown the directories and files to that user (chown = Change Ownership):

chown -R username:username /home/username

You could then use a tool, such as Adminer or phpMyAdmin, to restore database backups (just as you could use them to download backups on your current servers). You would need to install it as well, though Adminer is a single file and far less complicated than phpMyAdmin. With it, you simply download a single file from the URL below and access it as you would any normal PHP file (via URL), though you’ll want to either restrict access to it, or only upload it as needed as it’s not really a best-practice to leave open access to something that could be used to gain access to your database.

https://www.adminer.org/

srinukasaragadda1 • January 30, 2019