December 7, 2011 (Backups & Migrations with Akeeba Backup)

LOCATION: Idea Greenhouse, Durham, NH

TOPICS: Backing up and Migrating your Joomla Site with Akeeba Backup

ATTENDEES: Tom Elliot (host), Justin Herrin (presenter), Liane Haslauer, Lois Wolter, Kathy Lombard, Celeste Guidice, Bill Lord

A big thanks for Tom Elliot of Idea Greenhouse for inviting us to his location in Durham... allowing us to "return to our roots"! Tom has plenty of Joomla experience as a former employee of the popular templating company JoomlaShack. Tom was also a part of SimplWeb, a Joomla SaaS (Software as a Service) company.

Backing Up & Migrating with Akeeba Backup

Justin walked through the “manual” backup/migration process of a live site backup (made using Akeeba Backup core/free version) down to a localhost webserver environment (WAMP)...

1. Make a full site (files + database) backup of your site (saved as ZIP format)
2. Download the ZIP backup file and extract it to your local machine in a WAMP project folder (i.e. C:\wamp\www\mysite)
3. Create a new MySQL database using WAMP's phpMyAdmin
4. Visit http://localhost/mysite in your favorite browser... you will be redirected automatically to http://localhost/mysite/installation/index.php
5. You should see the Akeeba Backup migration wizard
   1. If you do not see Akeeba Backup and get a 500 Internal Server error, you may have a .htaccess file in your C:\wamp\www\mysite folder
   2. Temporarily rename the .htaccess file to htaccess.txt and refresh the browser
6. Run through the Akeeba Backup migration wizard
   1. Check your server settings and adjust as needed
   2. Enter your local MySQL database details that Akeeba Backup will restore to...
      1. Hostname: localhost
      2. Database Username: root (WAMP default)
      3. Database Password: root or <empty> (WAMP default)
      4. Databae Name: mysitedatabase
   3. Upon successful completion of the Akeeba Backup migration wizard, you will be prompted to remove the C:\wamp\www\mysite\installation folder
7. Visit http://localhost/mysite to see your site
8. If you disabled your .htaccess file in step 5, you will have to edit the “RewriteBase /” portion to be “RewriteBase /mysite/” and then rename the file back to .htaccess
9. Enjoy your local test site!

JUGNH Business

The group likes the idea of moving back to an alternating location schedule. It was decided to have meetings in Manchester on the 2nd Thursday of the month and meetings in Durham on the 2nd Wednesday of the month.

The JUGNH website needs to eventually be migrated to Joomla 1.7/2.5. We'll plan to spend some time at the January meeting on this.

There is still interest in testing new recruiting options such as Meetup.com.

Next Meeting

The next JUGNH meeting is scheduled for Thursday, January 12th in Manchester. Keep an eye on our Google Discussion Group for more details coming soon!