How to safely disable MediaCloud’s media offloading WordPress plugin

You’ll remember a couple of years ago, I switched to MediaCloud’s media offloading plugin on this site. Well, today I decided it was time to bring the media back to my local web server. My main reason for doing this is that my hosting provider does automatic backups and was missing all the media in those backups.

Thankfully, unwinding the MediaCloud stuff was relatively-simple. Instructions follow:

First, a quick tangent. I thought I’d utilize MediaCloud’s WP-CLI “download” function to bring all the media from S3 to my web server. I ran the commands, and it didn’t get everything for some reason. But in any case, I’ll show the command I ran below. Thanks to these WP-CLI examples, I was able to figure out the proper syntax to download from S3 straight to my WP install:

wp mediacloud:storage import --preserve-paths=preserve --import-only=false  --skip-thumbnails=false

After running the WP-CLI command above, I found some stray media files in my local wp-content/uploads/wp-content/uploads/… that I needed to manually copy over to the proper directories.

Then I did a search and replace to change urls from the S3 cloud urls to my local urls:

Upon examining the files in my local directory vs S3, I noticed many files were missing. So I downloaded the entire S3 bucket and then uploaded it to my web server to plug any gaps. In the future, I’d skip the WP-CLI step and just start with the bucket download. Fwiw, I use Coda 2 for my S3 connection, as I tried-and-failed to get Cyberduck to connect to my S3 bucket.

After completing the above steps, the work was complete!

So, effectively, the steps are simple:

1. Download the S3 bucket.
2. Upload the media files to your web server.
3. Search-and-replace the media urls.

That’s it!

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