During the past year or so, I learned to love my BackupBuddy. Ever since I use it, migrating WordPress sites has just been a breeze.
However, lately I have had quite a few multisite installations. So far, migrating WordPress multisite still has been a pain (for me, at least), even though you do have some options (I will get to them in a later post, promise!).
But today I actually managed to migrate a multisite installation using BackupBuddy. I am aware that the team at iThemes says using BackupBuddy with WordPress multisite is still experimental. (You might want to check out the BackupBuddy Forum.)
So always keep that in mind, please. But hey, this time it worked real well.
What I needed to do:
Adjust the wp-config.php file to allow BackupBuddy to work with multisite. Add the following line right above the /*That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */
define( 'PB_BACKUPBUDDY_MULTISITE_EXPERIMENT', true ); /* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */
Make sure BackupBuddy is activated for all sites in your network. Does it work yet? You might find your problem looking into the log file.
Besides, there is an option Server Tools within the BackupBuddy menu. Within the flag “Server” you find a long list of server configuration settings, a suggested value, the actual value and the status of your server. Most of them will be marked with a green “Pass” button, I also got two orange “Warning” buttons.
First of all, the PHP memory limit was too low (100M instead of at least 128M). I set it to 256M, which is recommended. This I could easily change within php.ini. (If you don’t know how to do this please ask your hosting company for assistance.)
Besides, there was a warning signal at wp-cron.php Loopbacks. If you don’t know what all the Server Configuration Settings mean, there is an info box explaining each item. It said that I needed to enable alternate WP cron. I checked the WordPress codex on this and found that I needed to add this line to my wp-config.php file:
define( 'ALTERNATE_WP_CRON', true );
After making these changes I was able to make a complete backup with BackupBuddy. On the new server, I first checked php.ini for the PHP Memory Limit. Everything else worked smoothly.
Once the sites were restored, I wasn’t able to login. I needed to change the domain of the site within wp-config.php:
define('DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE', 'hereYourNewDomain.com');
Now I was actually able to get in. 🙂 The last change I had to make was to adjust the domain of my second site in my multisite install.
That was it!