I'm doing local development on a site that's using JMS, and am now at the point where I need to migrate it to production. Before JMS I always used AkeebaBackup (formerly JoomlaPack) but my attempts at using that in combination with JMS seem to be failing miserably. I've read some other posts on the forums here that suggest using SSH and tar, however I don't have SSH access to my production environment. Also, the database name/connection info is different on my local machine than it will be in production.

So, what do I need to do to properly migrate this environment given the restrictions I have?

If you don't have SSH, perhaps your hosting provider give you a file manager that allows you "unzip", "untar" file.

The idea is to do the backup manually to control what you have in your "zip" or "tar" as it may be not correct with other tools.
We know that AkeebaBackup tried to improve the "Symbolic Link" processing but we don't know how to use that in AkeebaBackup.

I let other customer that perhaps are using this extension explain how they do it.