Restore Backup to different domain

I found this thread but as it’s a bit older and leaves some open questions about avatars I thought I’ll bring it up again.

Background: We’re moving a larger phpBB Forum to discourse. Import process is mostly straightened out thanks to a great importer. Due to the size of the forums the import takes about 36 hours on a machine that should be a good fit to run the forums later. To bring that down a bit I’m currently trying to find a good temporary high single core cpu server to do the import. I would then move the discourse backup over to the final server. I already found out that backup restore basically is a relatively quick task.

The only thing is: I’d use a temporary domain on the import server and already prepare the other server with an empty install on a different domain. So according to the linked thread the import on a different domain should work fine with a search/replace for the domain in sources that I need anyway when i switch over from the old phpBB server and a rebake at the end.

Is there anything else that I need to watch for? The thread talks about avatars not being moved over but I would be surprised if those wouldn’t be part of the backup.

What I do is configure the import server to run in the actual domain and avoid the remapping issues. The server doesn’t actually have to serve the web pages (except for testing).

The other solution is to follow the guide for changing host name and rebake all your posts.

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