For those of you who aren’t techies, here is a basic technique for bypassing the “middle man” (your own computer) when moving your website from one server to another. By harnessing the power of the Linux command line, you can really save some time in a most kickass way.
If you have a website with a lot of content, like large picture galleries or video files, moving to a new server presents some challenges. I’m going to ignore the obvious challenge of getting all the systems, like your blog system, your gallery program, etc, to work again. The most basic challenge I’ve found is simply moving those large files and directories. For example, if you have a directory with 400 megs of images in it, and you need to move the whole thing to a new server, but you have a normal DSL line at home with a horribly slow upload speed, it is simply not practical to download the whole directory to your computer then upload it to the new one. It will take all day.
