A new website — porting with VaultPress

This is a continuation of a series of posts about reworking my website into one that is entirely WordPress based. The series starts here:

A new web site – general requirements

I continued to refine the test gallery web site. It is now to the point where I like it better than the old site, although it’s still a work in progress. So now it’s time to take it live, and continue to enhance the live version.

I created a new WordPress instance in a directory of kasson.com, so that the external address is www.kasson.com/wpmain/. After I have transferred the the data, I will create a new index.php in the top-level web directory of kasson.com to fire up WordPress for everyone who types www.kasson.com into their browser. I installed VaultPress in this instance, and verified that the site worked. I let it complete a backup. I created an ftp account for VaultPress, and tested it to make sure that it worked.

Then I did a restore from www.kasson.com/wpmain/ to www.kasson.com/wpmain/. That worked:

Then I created another ftp account for VaultPress to use to access the test site. I went to the VaultPress control panel for the test site, and told it to do a restore to the www.kasson.com/wpmain site. It looked like it was going to work. I got a progress bar, then a flash of some other window, then back to the control panel. Then I got an email that said that the restore had failed, but didn’t say why.

I looked in vain for logs that might give me some clue as to what’s going on. The Activity Log in the two VaultPress control panels don’t even show any of the restores, successful or failed.

I can’t have any problems with VaultPress’s access to the new WordPress instance, or the restore from that instance to that instance wouldn’t have worked. And I think it’s unlikely that there’s a problem with read access to the test site, since VaultPress tests that when you configure the ftp access.

I think I need a conversation with VaultPress, and a look at the failed restore logs, wherever they are.

There is a preflight test suite that VaultPress performs before a restore. If one of those tests failed, maybe they have a record of which test it was. Actually, thinking about it, I don’t see how any of the preflight tests could fail if the destination site data were the same as that for kasson.com/wpmain, since a self-restore to that site worked.