I'm not sure if this is the right section, but hopefully it is. The problem I'm having is uploading a backup to my site. I bought a site a while back, and was sent the backup from the previous owner so that I could then upload it to my hosting. Which is with hostgator. I contacted hostgator asking for help and they said first I need to use WinRAR in order to "extract the folders/files then upload them to your /public_html folder on the server." I have WinRAR, and when I go into the file within WinRAR of the backup, there is a bunch of more folders such as vf, userdata, sslcerts, psql, mysql, httpfiles, homedir, cron, and lots more etc. Also listed is what aren't folders, but what I think are files. They have a little picture of the windows symbol on a piece of paper. These have names such as shadow, sds, quota, pds, mysql.sql, and more etc. What I assumed I had to do was go into individual folders, and upload the files, for instance, go into the homedir file and upload the home directory in the "Restore a Home Directory Backup" under backups in the hostgator cpanel. But when I go into the homedir folder there are a bunch of more folders and files such as tmp, public_ftp, .cpanel, access-logs, .canna, .bash-logout, and lots more etc. My problem is, what am I supposed to upload? Do I need to upload all of the individual files? Because there must be thousands of them, that would take weeks to do, so I know that I'm really missing something. I'm just trying to get this website back online, and I'm completely lost, to me it seems like you'd need to be a rocket scientist to make sense and understand all of this. I am completely stupid in this area of websites, but I'm learning. Anybody with a detailed explanation of what exactly to do would be greatly appreciated. +rep for all who help me.
Simply try uploading the zipped file using the "Restore a Home Directory Backup" function. It should be able to handle everything for you. Hope that helps
It doesn't, I tried that already. The hostgator staff said the following in one of their emails. "You must first extract the RAR file, and then upload the files in question. We do not have a method of unarchiving rar files on our servers."
thats kinda too bad, having to upload all them files. if you have a full backup, extract it and just upload the public_html folder and all its contents. you'll have to import your databases one by one. tedious, but if thats all they offer, then there ain't much you can do unless you find another host.
If this is a linux server and you have SSH access you can install "unrar" by doing "yum install unrar" or "apt-get install unrar" this should at lease solve the problem of decompressing those files and then use the suggested methods to restore your backup. EDIT: before doing the install, check to see if it is already installed. This command will unpack the file in its current location: unrar e filename.rar