OSTips - Create a Drupal Site Copy in Acquia’s DevDesktop

So you’re working away on your Drupal site using Acquia’s DevDesktop just like we do here at OSTraining, and you want to take a snapshot of your site to use for another project. Or maybe you just want to keep a backup of it at a certain state in your Drupal site development.

In this video, I’m going to show you exactly how to create Drupal site copy in Acquia’s DevDesktop. It’s really simple.

Let’s get to It.

“Hi, I’m Rod Martin, and this is OSTips from OS Training.

Thanks to DevDesktop, I’ve got a website that I’m working on for a course, and I’m going to create an exact duplicate.

go to DevDesktop
click on the Local database link
select Export menu link at top of Admin screen
select Custom instead of Quick
click Go

That’s going to actually download the entire database into a file, and that’s what you need.

go to DevDesktop
click on the More button
click New Drupal multisite (Here’s the key: you need to use multi-site to make this quick and really simple)
name the new site (I’m going to call this d9site2)
select Start with a MySQL database dump file
click Browse button
select the file you just downloaded
click Ok

DevDesktop is going to create the new multi-site. It takes just a moment.

select the new Multisite you just created from the dropdown
click on Local site link

And there you are. One key thing to remember is that NONE of the files that you’ve uploaded to your old site will be moved over to the new site. Again really simple to fix.

click Local code link
click on sites folder
click on default folder
click Copy “files”
click Paste Item into the site folder you just created
click Replace button
go to your site

You’re good to go!

The last thing you’ll want to do once you’ve logged back in is flush all caches. That’s going to rebuild all of your media, your images, your thumbnails, etc, etc.

As I said, it’s really simple with just a few steps to make a snapshot backup of a Drupal site at any stage of development using DevDesktop and multi-sites.

Thanks for watching today. This is OSTips from OSTraining. My name is Rod Martin, and we’ll see you in the next video.”

Author

Rod Martin

Rod holds two masters degrees and has been training people how to do "things" for over 25 years. Originally from Australia, he grew up in Canada and now resides just outside Cincinnati, Ohio. He has worked in both the non-profit and for-profit worlds, in small companies and large corporations. His extensive open source experience includes WordPress, Joomla and Drupal and he really knows how to help you get the most out of the system you chose. Rod plays ice hockey a couple of times a week and rides his Goldwing motorcycle pretty much everywhere he can.
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