Suppose you need to move your instance between different servers or, for example, from a local laptop to a Quintagroup hosted server. To accomplish this task you should deal with data.fs file - a database file, containing the entire Zope site. All the content of the Plone site is stored in this data.fs file, normally located in Var directory.
To move a site from one server to another, you can simply move the data.fs file - as long as the Plone and Zope versions that you are using are the same. To move a website, you have to copy the data.fs file and the Products folder to ensure that all the products and customizations that were made on the website on the old server to be there on the new server. Keep in mind that Zope and Plone versions are supposed to coincide on both hosts, so that the process of moving the instance ends up successfully.
In Linux this task can be carried out with the help of KRUSADER program.
- To start work with Krusader, you need to get SSH login/password.
- When you got the necessary login/password, you can access Zope Instance with SSH Login/Password
- After you have been connected, Krusader will display you the content of your instance. navigate to data1 -> var folder
- Inside you will see the list of files, one of which is Data.fs, the one we need:
Copy this file to the corresponding Var folder at the server you are moving your instance to.
Important: When you backup Data.fs - please do it with repoze.py script. If you copy Data.fs with cp while Zope Instance is running you might get a broken database file.