I migrated the blog from an unmanaged VPS to a Shared Hosting plan on Hostwinds. Their support is very good, and I know this because I really leaned heavy on them the past few days. I haven’t used cPanel in like 8 years. Check them out here: https:/
I made a full copy backup of the VPS onto my laptop using rsync, no problem. WordPress files were captured just fine, but I used a WordPress plugin to export the MySQL database. Big mistake. The export file turned out to be unusable, but I didn’t find that out until *after* I had shut down the old site. My bad! In hindsight, I should have just run mysqldump while the VPS was still up.
So I had to migrate the MySQL database by hand, using the VPS backup files on my laptop. Sadly, my time using databases ended with dBASE IV in 1987. I had to learn a thing or two, and right quick.
So, copied the MyISAM files from the VPS backup to /var/lib/mysql, ran MySQL (Mariadb), modified the wp options table to disable all plugins, dropped the various garbage tables left over by plugins (by matching table names with the default WP instance created on the new site using cPanel), exported via mysqldump, created a new database in cPanel, edited the dump file to comment out the CREATE and USE commands, imported the dump file, added a MySQL user and password for the new database, and last but not least, edited the wp-config.php file to set the new database, user, password, and table prefix.
I was astounded and rather gratified when I reloaded the new site and all the old content was displayed. Yay me!