I will probably be making an attempt to move the site from our existing server to our new dual-server environment this weekend. To accomplish this in an orderly way I will need to take the site off-line and then zip and transfer the entire site to the new server, unpack it and then do the same for the databases.

I am hopeful that this will only take about 4-6 hours at most. I am not quite as hopeful that everything is going to work exactly as before (differences with the server setups), so there may be a period of a week or so to tweak the servers.

Thanks and keep your fingers crossed!

Cheers,
Jim

ACK!

Downtime = Modeling Time

Gunnie

Do me a favor then - before you close the site down, can you let me know as i'll be doing the Trump KV review and it's a biggy. Would hate to lose the thing went the site goes down - Aaaggghhh!..Jim

Well I'm off to Vegas for the week, would you like me to get a bet down on how smooth this will go ? :-) :-)

Backing up and moving a site this size? That'll be fun!!! Good luck Jim...

Salut Jim!

Je croise les doigts... et touche du bois!

Jean-Luc

Best of luck, boss. I know what a dog server migrations and moves are. I feel your pain...

Oh well, guess I'll just have to make the most of this summery weather and have a barbeque instead... :-)

Im starting to sweat already...

Dave

Roger that !

Good luck chief. My fingers are crossed.......damn....... that's difficult while typing dude :-)

Thanks guys....okay.....it's going offline now.

Jim

Okay.... well I am running into an unforseen issue so it looks like this is not going to happen today (as I have a daughter school-thing to do from noon to 8pm).

Hopefully I can get this done during the week.

I did create a compressed site file though. 15.1GB

Cheers,
Jim

Greetings, Jim...
Everything seems to be working fine on my end, sir...How did the move go? I was aware of the operation around 8:00 this morning, and I just signed back on to check to see if we were back yet, and Lo and behold, there she was! Thanks, Jim!
Gunny

ok i guess i ll just have to be patient all weekend or paint some more on the last figure !!!!!! :-)

Hi Jim

Both the .com and .co.uk sites seemed to be down this morning (my time). Was that you doing the Big Switch or a problem with my server...?

All the best

Rowan

Mark - Switch hasn't happened yet!

Rowan - No that may have just been a momentary outage.

Cheers,
Jim

I admire your courage Jim! Your doing a fabulous job with the site. Its simply amazing how some of us just adapted to this beautiful thing that we call the web.

Bless you in the way that you see fit and by whom,

Uncle EasyOff

...when i tried to logon Sunday A.M., Jim, all that was visible was a screen that said that we were being moved to a new home...maybe you were just beginning the attempt at that time...or maybe I just wasn't fully awake yet! Thanks for the update!
Mark

Good Luck Jim. Ive done several migrations similar to this before and know how much it can be a pain especially when unexpected errors come up.

If you need some tips, let me know.

Thanks for the support all.

I am afraid I am no closer to getting this done and our hosting bill for this server is now due (overdue). So it looks like I will have another 30 day window to get this up and working properly. Probably a good thing anyways as having the old server to fall back on in case of a serious issue.

I will be away for a memorial service this weekend in LA so it may be the following weekend (Oct 1-2) that I make the actual switch.

Cheers,
Jim

If i may, i just thought i would add this one in.

The last time i did a similar migration, i performed one offline backup on the DB and left the live site running after.

I then concurrently applied the offline backup to the new DB and migrated the content over (php scripts) to the new server. Do all the testing you need there until all the bugs are ironed out before updating the domain to the new ip.

To update the DB back to the most updated copy, just run an online backup and then apply it to the older version on the new server. If you are running a MySQL DB, you can download free softwares out there that provide a GUI to help you do it as oppose to coming back down to command line.

Just some lessons i learnt which i thought i might share.

Jeremy,
Thanks for that info. Unfortunately for us since the gallery is getting new photos added by the hour it would be necessary for me to do a file and DB update almost concurrently and thus my need to have the site down while doing the migration. I suppose I could to the main site file migration and then do a seperate gallery update.

Thanks again,
Jim

yeah you could migrate the main site ahead of time (php scripts and updated DB (to the minute)) and only temporarily prevent access to the photo gallery during the migration. This way only sections of the site goes down at any one time not altogether.

In short, more static content always goes first, dynamic and real time content is always last to go.

The method i employed was to migrate it to the new server in stages so i started with the content + DB (main contents) first then followed by the forum + forum DB. This way gave us the opportunity to have the new server tested with the new content first before migrating the more real time content like the forum. This way was best when clients couldnt afford to be without the content at any time.

Granted the way you are doing it is best for having most data consistency during the migration.