Migrating Drupal

Locally I use MAMP on my Macbook to develop Themes for Drupal. There's a nice module called backup & migrate which you can use to get the relevant tables from your Drupal installation.

Using admin/content/backup_migrate you can get and restore the Database quickly after after installing the module. If there was some larger Work on files like a drupal core update was done on my on-line Testing Server I get a new copy of the whole htdocs-directory into a blank new working-directory (e.g. /georgia/4-2009) into the project folder within MAMP htdocs on the macbook. If you safe the Database on the remote machine before downloading the files by ftp, the actual backup gets included. You can restore the database manually by locating the SQL file at /georgia/4-2009/htdocs/sites/yoursite/files/backup_migrate/manual/ and use PHPmydmin to restore. The local domain name georgia.local has its own settings file. Database settings are stored in a site folder for the local domain: /georgia/4-2009/htdocs/sites/georgia.local

You create an new Database with PHPmyAdmin according to your Version Folders Name and edit the Connection settings in the database accordingly. If something appears strange be sure to empty drupal cache at admin/settings/performance and the testing servers have each their own settings file. With MAMP-Pro I set up a working Domain (e.g. georgia.local) so I just need to change the disc location of the htdocs-directroy within my MAMP-Pro to the latest version.