I don´t believe I am the only one.

[pwired]

Ok, this afternoon it happened again. And it happened more times in the past.

So long if you don´t have a secure backup.

Data missing or data corrupted when moving a webshop from one server to

another. I compress all files and folders in the server root, you know, public_html

or home etc.. Then I download the zip file and upload it to the destination host.

Then uncompress the zip file on the destination host and things should be ok right ?

Not ! Many images, thumbs, slides and icons simply missing.

My experience is also that moving data over http is less reliable than over ftp.

It looks that compressing each folder separately, download, upload and uncompress

is working better than compressing everything in one big zip file.

I don´t believe that I am the only one running into these issues.

So my question is, is there a foolproof protocol to move a big webshop or website

from one server to another, without data loss/corruption ?

What about moving everything directly from server to server

with something like batchsync ftp with automatic reconnects,

verified retries, and resumes. It´s 600 dollar but it might be worth it

if it delivers nightmare free copying from server to server.

Edit:

If I uncompress a zip file on the destination server, half of the files/folders

are not uncompressed. So is there maybe any difference between

zip / rar / tar or tar.gz ?  I mean does tar.gz has less problems with data corruption ?

I have no idea.

[diogo]

try rsync http://rsync.samba.org/

EDIT: their website could use a freshen up...

[Christophe]

I'm not the first one to reply .

If it was by (S)FTP, I would have thought about the fact that some recommend to specify binary transfer for archives like .zip files in order to avoid file corruption (?).

Could it have something to do with permissions?

Have you tried http://www.xcloner.com?

Of course, rsync and other (more or less) similar tools are convenient.

[davo]

I used ispconfig as a control panel. This runs nightly backups of the database and content. It the tar balls these. I then use scp to copy them from one server to another and then untar them.