How to migrate accounts when root access is unavailable at the source server

Introduction

As a server administrator you may often have to transfer clients' websites in which root access is unavailable at the source server, making things a little bit more difficult. However, the cPanel & WHM software have a few features that should help in these situations.

Procedure

Method 1: Transfer an account with a Password:

While you may not have root access to the source server, it is very likely that you have the password for the cPanel user on the source server.

If this is the case you can use a feature from the "Transfer or Restore a cPanel account" interface to copy the account.

For details on how to use this please refer to our original documentation:

For cPanel versions 90 or higher please view here.

For cPanel versions 88 or lower please view here.

Method 2: Restore from a full backup:

Another alternative is to simply transfer the account by means of restoring a full account backup. You can obtain a full account backup by requesting one from the hosting provider/system administrator of the source server, or you can create it yourself if the feature has not been disabled by the administrator by using the Backup, or Backup Wizard features within cPanel.

1. Create a backup at the source as the cPanel user:
   1. Via the Backup Wizard interface
   2. Via the Backup interface
2. Once you have the full backup generated you can restore it via the WHM:
   1. Restore from a full backup that is located in the server
   2. Or upload the full backup to restore
   3. Alternatively, you may perform this via the command line using the following provided script.