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Migrating WordPress 4.4.2 Installation from Ubuntu Linux (Rackspace) to Windows (Azure)

In an unanticipated request I have to move a WordPress installation running on a LAMP stack to an Azure instance running WIMP (Windows, IIS, MySQL PHP). In the Azure settings, MySQL is running as a cloud-based database service.

BackupBuddy has been a reliable tool for single site migration and its beta has support for multi-site migration which is sufficiently reliable. But moving from Linux to Windows is another story.

The alternative is the free Duplicator - which I only come to know of having contacting WPML.org technical support for another reason.

The key steps:

1) Change permalink back to default
2) Deactivate / Delete any unused plug-ins
3) Backup using Duplicator
4) Download the installer.php and the .zip archive
5) Upload installer.php and the unzipped files to Windows server

This pre-unzip is necessary so that the php script does not have to tackle the unzip which resulted in a timeout in our scenario. And I have no access to Windows RDS to change the php.ini configs, allowing longer php timeout value.

6) Launch the installer (domain.com/installer.php)
7) Choose to restore only the database
8) Check the database update parameters (essentially change file paths etc.)
9) Check the installer-log.txt and see any major issues. I have 2 "Deployment errors" that do not seem to create any real issue.
10) Change the permalink back to original
11) Test the site
12) Remove unused files generated by Duplicator.

If you forget to upload the unzipped files and launch installer.php and choose to restore only the database, Duplicator is smart enough to remind you - nice design.

Site is running in less than 20 minutes. Much much more time is researching and studying other manual approaches that involves tweaking servers and reinstalling from scratch. Highly recommend Duplicator in this scenario. https://wordpress.org/plugins/duplicator/


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