In order to test different mods on a given site, I would like to duplicate the site in order to be able to discard and fall back if necessary.

I follow this procedure :

1. Install backup & migrate module and enable
2. Backup the mysql database
3. zip the "sites" folder in entirety

Create a new apache virtual host, then :

4. Install drupal fresh (this works fine)
5. Install backup & migrate
6. Restore the mysql backup from the original site
7. unzip a copy of the "sites" zip file over the default sites folder.

Result : new site wants to connect to original database. Not desirable.
So, I modify the "settings.php" file in the "sites/default" folder to point to the new database.

Result : new drupal site reports multiple errors, not happy about a whole range of stuff, slightly broken.

What am I getting wrong? I cannot find a clean descriptive procedure for correctly backing up and restoring an entire site.

Hi Clive,

The easiest thing to do is to backup your whole site rather than trying to do things piece by piece. For example, here's a good tutorial on how to do that:
www.ostraining.com/blog/drupal/move-your...e-to-a-new-location/

Then the only thing left to do is to change your settings.php (which is covered in the tutorial above as well). If you get any errors after this part, please let us know what they are and we'll help you to trouble shoot.

Hope this helps! :)

Kind regards,
Nick

Hi Nick,

Thanks for the response - tried various options with pretty much the same result, then (half by accident) found the problem. Turns out that on the linux host I did the original file compression, the compression software decided that as the "tmp" folder didn't have any files (at the time of creation) it wouldn't bother to place it in the zip archive. Once I created the "tmp" folder on the target site everything worked.

Hi Clive,

You're welcome!

Wow, that's incredible! I'm really glad you got it figured out though :)

Kind regards,
Nick