Akeeba math for beginners

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Today, I was transferring a customers’ website to a server of our favoured hosting company.  To do this, I used an Akeeba back-up I had made for that purpose.
After uploading the archive to the new hosting package, I ran Kickstart to unpack the archive.  I was puzzled when I saw that specific files couldn’t be unpacked.  So, I deleted all the unpacked files, and tried again.

Same result. Akeeba told me it couldn’t unpack the files.  Alternatively, I tried using the FTP mode.  Again, the same result.  That’s where I got side-tracked, and started to believe that the problem lied with the images folder.  I triple checked it, and then started to upload these images manually.  The result wasn’t any different.

the problem

I was scratching my head.  What was going on?  After a deep breath, I analyzed the situation, and saw what had happened.  There wasn’t enough space left to unpack the archive – or, to upload the files. Some basic math would have saved me lots of time.

Here’s what happened.  The (shared) hosting packages we sell, are limited at 200 mb.  That’s more than enough for 99% of our customers.  In this case, however, it led to problems.

The archive I had uploaded, was already 100MB on its own, so it claimed half of the available space.  The unpacked files were 130MB in size.  You don’t need a calculator to know that 130MB and 100MB  equal 230 MB, which is 30MB over the limit.

In my case, the problem was solved once I removed the archive from the server.  I had to upload the images manually, which seemed to take forever.

Tips

Before you start uploading your Akeeba Archive, do some math of your own.

  • What’s the size of your archive? To find out, you can simply take a look at the file.
  • what’s the unpacked size of your files?  If you can’t access the files directly to find out, here’s a suggestion:  unpack your files using the Akeeba Backup
  • What’s the “limit” on your hosting package?

If you add the size of your archive file and the total size of the unpacked files, you’ll know whether you might expect problems using Akeeba Kickstart.  You could try to slim down your archive, and upload some of the files manually, instead.

 

4 thoughts on “Akeeba math for beginners”

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  2. Pingback: Splitting up your Akeeba Archive before uploading « Joomla and more

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