Manually move sites between servers

Here's a manual procedure to migrate sites between servers. This can also be used to test upgrades without removing the original site.

Source webserver/platform

1. backup (older versions of drush will be "drush provision backup")
   

   drush provision-backup sourcesite.example.com

2. copy files over to the new server (skip this if just deploying on a local platform)
   

   scp ~aegir/backups/sourcesite.example.com-2009-07-31.tar.gz aegir@destsever.example.com:backups

Destination webserver/platform

1. go to the right platform
   
   cd /var/aegir/drupal-x.y
2. drush provision-deploy. Make sure the sites/destinationsite.example.com doesn't exist already. Older versions of drush will be "drush provision deploy".
   
   drush provision-deploy destinationsite.example.com ~/backups/sourcesite.example.com-2009-07-31.tar.gz
3. add url to your /etc/hosts (if necessary -- you may have a better solution like a dns alias)
4. apache2 restart # (reload doesn't pick it up for me)
   
   sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
5. verify platform Best to verify the platform in the aegir web UI. This will cause aegir to import and verify the site.
6. load site in browser

If you are using ImageCache, take a look at it. If it's broken, you should re-add all of your images.

Note: this will eventually be automated as 0.4 will feature multi-server support and clone support.

Note: Step #2 for the destination server does not seem to work as of 0.4-alpha14 (and possibly earlier versions). See this thread for possible solutions.