Question

I've just recently relocated my domain to a new hosting service in order to install TWiki (and reported on my experience in TWikiOnWebHostingSites). However, I have had some questions about the quality of this service (Aletia) and am considering that I may have to move my domain again at some point. This raised the question: how difficult will it be to relocate my TWiki site? I'll be putting a fair amount of effort into developing my site and I would HATE to loose all that work. I did a number of searches to see if I could find any relevent info and did not. Perhaps my fears are unfounded (I hope so) - but I'd like to get feedback from someone with more technical insight into the matter. So my question is: would moving a twiki site to a new server (host) constitute a trivial (>1 hour), moderate (>4 hour), substantial, HUGE, or impossible task? Any feedback much appreciated!

• TWiki version: Dec, 01
• Web server: Apache
• Server OS: Linux
• Web browser:
• Client OS:

-- LynnwoodBrown - 23 Mar 2002

Answer

As long as the new site has Telnet/SSH access and meets the other requirements in TWikiOnWebHostingSites, it should be a 'moderate' (>4 hour) task. When I moved a site from one server to another on our intranet, it definitely took me a fair while, though I wasn't so experienced in TWiki then.

The main thing is ensuring that the permissions are right on the new server - using the Unix tar command is a good idea, e.g. with GNU tar just do (from directory above twiki dir) tar czvf twiki-files.tar.gz on the old server, then do tar xzvf twiki-files.tar.gz on new server (you may need to move things around of course). Also, you will find that some files were created as nobody, permission 644, by the CGI scripts - they'll come out as owned by you, permission 644, which will break things until you do a chmod 666 on all these files. See TWikiInstallationGuide for details.

See also TWikiDebugging, and CookbookActivePerlTestenv for a newer testenv that provides a lot more information (e.g. which required Perl modules are installed).

-- RichardDonkin - 24 Mar 2002

See also MigratingDataFrom1TwikiTo2Twiki, HowToMigrateWikiBetweenServers, HowToRestoreFromBackup, MoveInstallationToOtherMachine, HowToMoveTwikiData.

-- PeterThoeny - 05 Apr 2007

TWiki has now an easy point & click solution to upgrade TWiki with the help of the BackupRestorePlugin.

-- PeterThoeny - 2011-09-06