Restore from cPanel Backup shipped two days earlier with an honest gap: if a customer’s database has their old domain baked into a settings table, such as a WordPress site URL, the import doesn’t rewrite it. That’s the right call, since blindly rewriting guessed strings is the kind of confident-but-wrong behavior this migration work has been trying to avoid, but it leaves the customer without a way to fix it short of a manual SQL client. This closes that gap.
Not folded into the cPanel-restore feature
A domain change matters for any migrated site, so this is a standalone tool under Databases. The cPanel-restore results page links to it when a domain mismatch is detected, but it works on any database the account owns.
The isolation boundary is the same one the Database Browser uses
Every operation runs as the account’s own granted database user, never the administrator, for the same reason as the Database Browser’s query runner: the database’s grant system is the real boundary, not just an application-level ownership check.
The bug a naive version would ship with
WordPress and a lot of other software store structured data in PHP’s serialized format, which records the exact byte length of each string. A plain string replace works until the replacement has a different length, at which point the value silently stops reading back correctly. Established tools handle this by unserializing the value, replacing every string inside it, and reserializing. This tool does the same, and goes further: a serialized value containing an object anywhere is left untouched, since decoding it safely isn’t guaranteed to reproduce the original bytes.
Scope, deliberately
Only tables with a single-column primary key are changed. Others are reported as skipped rather than guessed at, because a reliable row-by-row update needs a reliable way to address exactly one row.
Live-verified against real data
A table shaped like typical WordPress options and posts tables, with plain strings, a serialized array, and a row that should never match, confirmed all three cases: plain strings replaced, the serialized array reserialized with a correct length and reading back cleanly, and the non-matching row byte-for-byte untouched.
Also fixed: a sidebar gap
Feedback showed there was no menu item for cPanel migration. Restore a cPanel Account had routes, a controller, and a working page, but no sidebar entry. A review of the rest of the sidebar found the same gap on Import Account. Both now live in a new “Migration” navigation group.