The Blog of Xangis

Yesterday I wrote about my experience moving a Wordpress installation. Today it was a Drupal move, relocating the fictionclassics.com site to a new server. The process turned out to be remarkably similar.

First I downloaded the entire directory structure of the Drupal site to my local machine.

Once that was done, I logged into the old server’s control panel in order to run PHPMyAdmin and export the entire database as an SQL query. The database ended up being larger than I had expected at 55 megabytes.

After downloading the exported database query as a .SQL file, I connected to the new server and uploaded the directory structure that I had downloaded earlier.

While that was running, I created a new database user and database for the site, granting the new username permissions to the new database. Then I logged into PHPMyAdmin to import the database.

WHOOPS!

The PHPMyAdmin panel was set with a file size limit of 50 megabytes. My file was 55. Luckily the panel supports importing .zip files, so I ran Winzip and crunched the file down to 15 megabytes. Then I was able to upload and import without a hitch.

After that, I edited the /sites/default/settings.php file to change my database connection settings to point to the new database.

After changing the domain’s DNS to point to the new server, everything was up and running.

Overall, relatively painless other than the minor slowdown caused by having to compress the database. Drupal seems to be pretty storage-intensive with its database. The site has about 600 pages of content totaling about 5 megabytes, so obviously there is a lot of extra information being stored.