Running Transfer Tool multiple times

gareth.star

• June 09, 2016 10:43

Hi. I'm about to start the process of migrating a CentOS 5.x WHM server to a new CentOS 7.x WHM server. I've read about the Transfer Tool and plan on using that to hopefully minimize my work. My question is, can I use Transfer Tool multiple times to migrate incremental changes as I go? For example: - Day 1 - Transfer Tool transfers everything - Day 2 - I don't do anything - Day 3 - I run transfer tool again. It finds that there's been new mail on the old server so it just transfers the new mail over, leaving everything else intact. Essentially I'm hoping that Transfer Tool provides rsync like functionality. Thanks!

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  Infopro

  • June 09, 2016 16:04

  You don't want to do that I don't think. The docs should be of some use to you, specifically the explanation about the Transfer Process: Transfer Tool - Documentation - cPanel Documentation If you don't have any customized DNS configurations of some sort, once accounts are moved to a new properly configured server email should start coming and going to the new server. Email that doesn't would be retried from the sender for a bit.

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  gareth.star

  • June 09, 2016 18:58

  I've read through the docs. That section seems to focus more on DNS than anything else. Am I right in saying that the Transfer tool copies files and databases associated with an account? And back to my original question. The reason why there may be a gap (of 1 or more days) in my transfer is because I need some time to verify that my new server works correctly before making it live. After I perform a transfer, would I just be able to rsync the new/changed files from the original server to the new, basically doing what I wanted in my first post? Does the directory structure in the new server after using Transfer Tool match the original server?

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  twhiting9275

  • June 09, 2016 19:54

  Hi there, As mentioned by infopro, you really don't want to run this multiple times. That's bad. I would keep the old server running for a week or two after you get the system moved over, and use DNS clustering to serve everything off of the new server. With cPanel, the odds of something breaking in this case aren't that high, though it could happen. RE: mail, use rsync
  rsync -azv -e"ssh -pPORTNUM" oldserverip:/home/user/mail/ /home/user/mail/
  The downside to this is going to be that your deleted mails will pop back up in your inbox (and this includes mail client filtering). I can confirm that using rsync will transfer mail. I'm not sure how the uid will be handled, so you'll probably want to do this as an individual user cron, not a global root cron. For that, from the new server:
  MAILTO="" */5 * * * * rsync -azv -e"/usr/bin/ssh -pportnum" oldserverip:~/mail/ ~/mail/
  Set this up in every user's cron.

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  gareth.star

  • June 10, 2016 18:30

  Thanks for the tips, twhiting9275!

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