Transfer cPanel account to new server with low storage space

[DavidRMF]

Greetings. I'm pretty new to the world of WHM/cPanel as you might soon notice (hopefully not too badly).

I am moving from a shared hosting (old server) to a dedicated VPS (new server). A couple domains with its databases, email services and webapps are all working fine under a single cPanel user, but server performance is not appropriate at several points due to other websites in the machine. Thus, I need the new server to have dedicated resources and (I expect) better performance. cPanel reports a total usage of ~45GB of storage in the old server.

Using WHM's User Account Transfer a backup file of ~35GB is created and copied over from old to new server, but I am getting the following error message upon restore:

Account “[removed]”: Insufficient disk space is available. “/home” on host “[removed]” has 34.6 GB free and requires at least 104.3 GB free, which includes space for temporary files.

I am aware that this is just about not having enough space, but after spending hours with my hosting provider, I don't have an option to increase the storage of the VPS, not even by paying any amount or fee. Is there any way I can get this happening through another process or using the old server as some kind of external storage? I am open to all suggestions.

Thanks all in advance.

 

[cPRex]

Hey there! Since you're able to perform the migration, it sounds like you have root access to both systems, correct? If so, I would do the following to get this working:

Make a backup on the Source machine with this command:

/scripts/pkgacct --skiphomedir username

This will create a pkgacct file on the source machine that doesn't include the data inside /home/username, which should save you a large amount of space, as the majority of the disk usage is likely to be email and user files. Once you have that pkgacct file created you can move that over to the new Destination machine and restore the account.

After the restore is complete you can use rsync to sync the data from /home/username between the two systems.

Can you try that and see if that gets you good results?

 

[DavidRMF]

Thanks for the reply.
I did have root access on the target new server, but not on the source shared old server. Past tense used, since the whole migration has been scrapped for the time being, so until further notice this won't be happening and I no longer have access to the target server. I will keep your recommendation in mind, for when this needs to be attempted again.

 

[cPRex]

Thanks for the details. For any fancy operations like that you would need root access on the source side as well to make the custom pkgacct file.

If you need help in the future, you know where we're at :D