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Can I migrate a blog that is running in an instance, to a new instance using the console?

Edit:

I want to migrate a wordpress blog from one instance to another and all I have is the Instance IP and the password file.

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2 Answers

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Depends. But probably not.

"Running" is a very generic term. Now, if you want to have an exact copy of your current system to redeploy you could shut it down and use the console tools to create a new AMI based on the current state of your machine. You would then be able to deploy new EC2 VMs based on your current machine. See here for EBS instances or here for S3 instances.

Problem is, this can't deal with data changing. This tends to happen rather often with a blog. What you really want is an AMI that uses data stored in an EBS volume: EBS volumes are intended to be resilient, EC2 images are not. Have the blog software configured and set up to use data on EBS, set your EBS volume to remain on termination, and create an AMI. Now you can migrate the instance and still use your data.

If you really want high-availability/persistence, you should use a distributed SQL database. But that's probably overkill.

Edited
You should move your database files to an EBS volume. You'll probably want to use a second instance for this so you don't have to touch your primary: export the MySQL data to disk, set up MySQl on the new instance to store its data on an EBS volume's mountpoint, then import the data. Set up a wordpress install and it should be able to read your data. I can't help you much more on the wordpress side of things; I don't use it myself. But it should allow you to do this.

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P.S. if you're talking about the web console, you can use it to migrate things once you've done some initial setup with the command-line tools. But the tools will install on any linux, doesn't have to be an EC2 instance. – Michael Lowman Jul 5 '11 at 15:25
Edited. Thanks. Hope it helps more. – silkwormy Jul 5 '11 at 16:06
Can I do that only using EC2 tools? – silkwormy Jul 5 '11 at 16:50
@silkwormy No. You're going to have to get your hands dirty here – Michael Lowman Jul 5 '11 at 16:51
how much time do you say that would take? Can't I just export the wordpress blog, create a new instance with wordpress and import everything? – silkwormy Jul 5 '11 at 16:52
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If by console you mean the AWS Management Console, then no. That is for controlling the virtual hardware resources associated with your account, not the software and data inside them.

If by console you mean the unix (or your OS's) terminal, then almost certainly yes, but you will have to give us a lot more details about your OS, blog engine, data storage type, etc.

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Edited. Thanks. Hope it helps more. – silkwormy Jul 5 '11 at 16:06

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