Moved Joomla with Akeeba and Kickstart - Pages are returning 404's

I took an akeeba backup and moved it to a new server - the site as it exists has an 'enter page' that's plain html and then joomla is installed to a folder called 'site' so its mydomain.com/site is the Joomla root. The new server does not have a domain pointed to it its just an ip with a username like so the public html is http://xxx.xxx.xx.xx/~user/

so I put my 700mb backup into the http://xxx.xxx.xx.xx/~user/site folder (without ssh you can imagine how long this took) put the kickstart files in there set up the db on the new server ran the kickstart.php with both with the default settings (a blank site url) and trying to set the site url (http://xxx.xxx.xx.xx/~user/site) both ways the akeeba/kickstart backup went off without a hitch - I go to the site's default and it looks fine I'm actually amazed how smoothly it went but if I click the about page or any other page I get a 404.

If I run the same backup on localhost the menus don't load at all so I don't know what thats all about. I have very limited Joomla experience a开发者_C百科m mostly a wordpress guy - any ideas why the install and site is running fine but I'm getting these 404's?

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Most likely the problem is with the SEF URLs. You need to change your htaccess file. Look for:

RewriteBase /site

Change it to:

RewriteBase /~user/site