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Site Restoration

#11765 Restoring a site, do I need to create a new database?

Posted in ‘Site restoration’
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Environment Information

PHP version
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CMS Type
Other
CMS Version
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Kickstart version
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Latest post by on Tuesday, 01 May 2012 18:00 CDT

Thursday, 29 March 2012 17:32 CDT

MrClick
A quick question.
I backed up my site using Akeeba Backup before I decided to update Joomla from 1.7x to 2.5x. The back up was successful, but the update went wrong and reported unsuccessful. The front end looks fine, back end looks fine until I try to access the User Management where I get many errors. Basically nothing but error messages. joomla Control panel says I have Joomla 2.5z. All the other components seem fine and work fine. I could even access my backend and front end using different users.

Now I want to restore back the site that I backed up before the update. Back to 1.7x. So my question is, do I need to create a new database using phpmyadmin/cPanel or I can use the same old database? Will creating a new database be better?
The whole process is done using a live site.

Thanks.

Thursday, 29 March 2012 17:36 CDT

nicholas
There are two (safe) ways to do it:
1. Remove all database tables from your existing database and reuse the same database
2. Remove the old database and create a new one
Both are equivalent; the trick is to make sure that the database you are restoring to is empty (doesn't have any tables) to minimise the chance of screwing something up accidentally.

What is even more important is that before restoration you have to download all your backup files locally, then remove all files and folders from your site. Only then can you restore a backup of an earlier version of Joomla!. If Joomla! 2.5 files exist and you restore a Joomla! 1.7 site on top of it, hell breaks loose. I've done that once (and didn't enjoy the subsequent troubleshooting!), so I try to warn everybody who's about to do the same mistake :)

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Thursday, 29 March 2012 23:32 CDT

MrClick
What can I say. When I post at 6AM Malaysia time, and Nicholas himself answers few minutes later (may be 11PM Greece time), not just with the answer but an additional tip, you can't help but be committed to be his customer as long as he is in business.

The problem with Akeebabackup is that you are never afraid to experiment. You always think I got my back covered..

With that, I thank Nicholas for the excellent support.

Friday, 30 March 2012 02:31 CDT

nicholas
Hm, my reply was at 22:36 UTC, so it was 1:36 a.m. over here. I think you were the last ticket I replied before going to bed :)

Thank you for your kind words and the tweet!

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Friday, 30 March 2012 06:48 CDT

MrClick
I was about getting ready for a site restoration this weekend. I found that my redirect link table has almost over 200000 records. I emptied it. Fix the database, and now everything is fine. I did not have to restore anything. My user management is back on track.

Thanks anyway for your support.

Friday, 30 March 2012 07:17 CDT

nicholas
Let me guess, you enabled Joomla!'s redirection plugin and left the default options to record 404 errors, right? IMHO, recording 404s on a regular basis is a big mistake. The only reason to do that is right after a site redesign, when you know that tons of people will be coming in with broken links. It makes sense to record 404s for a few days (10 at the most), making sure that the most frequent 404s are redirected to an equivalent page on the new site.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Saturday, 31 March 2012 23:26 CDT

MrClick
Hi Nicholas,

You are right. Not that I know what I was doing. I wish I knew 1% of what you know.
The Redirect System Joomla Plug-in was on. There are no configuration to change. Either enabled or disabled. I decided to to disable it. Because the moment I enable it, few minutes later (not few days), i get hundreds of entries. I could only translate this as a big problem/bug/hack that I can't do much to fix. Or is there?

So now it is disabled.

Thanks.

Sunday, 01 April 2012 01:52 CDT

nicholas
Well, I learn things exactly the same way as everyone: trial and error :) The only difference is that because I have to do a lot of support every day, I probably get to see more site problems in a week than you'd do in a year.

Regarding your issue, since you have Admin Tools Professional you can always use Admin Tools' URL Redirection feature instead of Joomla!'s Redirection component. The reason I left that feature in Admin Tools is because I had the same problem as you on my own site and I figured that it'd come in handy to people who don't want to flood their databases with the 404 URLs if all they want is a couple of redirections.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Tuesday, 01 May 2012 18:00 CDT

System Task
system
This ticket has been automatically closed. All tickets which have been inactive for a long time are automatically closed. If you believe that this ticket was closed in error, please contact us.
Edited by on 2012-05-01 18:00 CDT

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