How do you move a WP blog with a .tar file?

  • I am trying to move my blog from one host to another. I went to the C-panel of my old host and there I found a backup utility for “backing up my files to move to another server” So now I have all of my files in a .tar.gz file that looks like a .zip file but I can’t unpack it on the new server. My new host tech support said to unpack it on my harddrive and then upload it but that doesn’t work. Another “expert” told me to just rename the file with a .zip extension. That didn’t work either. I now have an empty folder (no WP installation) and an empty database. The original install was attempted in an elefante made blog.

    If I could get ftp access and just download the whole thing I think it might work but my old host is less than helpful in getting that.

    Can I make it work with the .tar.gz file? How do I get it to unpack?

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  • I believe you can use https://www.7-zip.org/ to extract that tar file on your local machine. If that tar file doesn’t have your database backup you may need to do that via phpMyAdmin at your new host.

    Related
    Backing Up Your Database

    Thread Starter jcorbett

    (@jcorbett)

    Thanks Michael. I forgot to mention that I did unpack the .tar file with the 7-zip utility after reading about it here. That is what I uploaded to the elefante installation. That upload had NO effect on the site. One thing I noticed was that even after unpacking with 7-zip there was still one very large file in there that remained a tar file. The database info did make it into mysql but I have no way to tell if it is correct or not.

    I tried uploading the contents of the unpacked file to an empty (no wp install) and I got just a list of all the files.

    For right now I have reset the dns to my old server until I (or someone else) figure this out.

    One method of moving WordPress from domain x to y
    1. At old blog do Tools->Export
    2. At old blog backup database and files in case you ever need them (see WordPress Backups.
    3. Switch name servers to new host
    4. Do clean install of WordPress at new host (see Installing WordPress
    5. If you have custom theme and plugins, upload copy of wp-content folder from the backup in step 2
    6. Do Tools->Import->WordPress with file from step 1

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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