hermes-skills/skills/devops/ops-portal-and-collector/references/siteground-sftp-backup.md

SiteGround SFTP Backup (July 2026)

When SiteGround hosting is decommissioned (migrating to app3 netcup), all 21 sites were backed up to Wasabi S3 via SFTP.

Key Constraints

• No remote shell access. SiteGround's SFTP on port 18765 blocks exec_command() — no remote tar, no find | wc, no echo. Only pure SFTP operations (listdir, read, write). This means per-file streaming over the SFTP channel, which is very slow for large WordPress sites with thousands of files.
• Directory structure: Sites live at /<domain>/<domain>/public_html (nested directory with same name as site).
• Speed: Each file requires a separate SFTP round-trip to open and read. The backup script uses paramiko.SFTPClient to recursively traverse directories and stream each file into a local tarfile in Python. For a 14K-file site, this takes 20-30 minutes.

SFTP Credentials

Stored in the recovery manual and /root/.ssh/siteground.key (chmod 600). Key is DES-EDE3-CBC encrypted with passphrase LoveMyBoys73!.

Restore Process

To restore a site from the S3 backup to a new host:

1. Pull the backup: aws s3 cp s3://hermes-vps-backups/siteground/<domain>/<domain>-<date>.tar.gz .
2. Extract: tar xzf <domain>-<date>.tar.gz -C <target-dir>
3. Import MySQL database (needs a separate SQL dump — SFTP doesn't cover MySQL)
4. Update wp-config.php with new DB credentials
5. Point DNS to the new host IP
6. Run coolify (or the site provisioning tool on app3) to wire up SSL

Note on MySQL

Only site FILES were backed up via SFTP. The MySQL databases were NOT exported during the SFTP backup. To migrate a WordPress site fully, a MySQL dump is also needed from the SiteGround phpMyAdmin or via the existing RunCloud MySQL connection.