Made migrating my sites really easy! (One minor caveat)

I tried to manually migrate one of my WordPress sites using the directions in the Codex. I copied my files and database over exactly, and even used the same URL (I was moving from one host to another). When I tried firing up the new site…. nothing. No error or anything, just a blank page.

This plugin basically rescued me. It created a full backup of each of my sites and let me port them over seamlessly, or almost seamlessly. I had to tweak a few settings because I moved my sites from one domain to another (using forwarding domains as “temporary domains” so that I could access each site on both hosts until I was sure everything worked right), but that was easily handled within the WordPress Dashboard. I also had a problem when I re-enabled one of my caching plugins, where it killed the new site. For now, I’ve deleted it entirely, and will reinstall later, after backing the site up again.

My one minor caveat mentioned in the topic title – the plugin uses what appears to be a proprietary backup format. 7-zip recognizes pretty much every standard archive format, but this one is a mystery to it. This plugin is required at both ends of the operation, meaning that the backups can’t be used in any manual fashion. That’s a REALLY minor caveat, though, and I still give this plugin five stars.

The only thing that would make this extension better is a scheduled periodic backup function to create importable “wpress” files every X days or weeks.