On 11/05/07, David_S_Green@dell.com David_S_Green@dell.com wrote:

As I was in the process of preparing to move our wiki, the server up and bought the farm. Good news is I had a backup of the database directory (wikidb).....question is I need to restore that directory to a new server. This simply a copy of the original database directory, and it is not a database "dump'.

Is there a way for me to resurrect the wiki from this? All the Mediawiki pages seem to cover is "moving" a wiki, not recovering one. I also have a complete copy of the wiki file folder (localsettings.php, images directory, all other directories).

Depends on what files were backed up. MediaWiki uses both InnoDB and MyISAM tables; the former stores all data in "InnoDB data files", which defaults to being a single "ibdata1" file stashed somewhere according to the server configuration. MyISAM splits tables up into definitions, data and indexes. You'll need both to effect a decent recovery.

I had a recent discussion with a user in IRC where this was the case; it seems that restoring the backed-up files to their appropriate, corresponding locations on the new server did the trick. You should check the output of SHOW TABLES when done, and run a few simple selects, e.g. SELECT * FROM page LIMIT 1; to check that the data seems sane.

Rob Church