Note

These instructions are meant to be first read before disaster strikes. Therefore, a fair amount of humour has been used throughout. If you try to read it after disaster striked you will naturally find the humourous parts inappropriate, or even offensive. Rest assured that this is because you are under a huge amount of stress. As soon as you'll have finished following the instructions herein, you will be able to re-read this document with a light heart and enjoy the humorous puns as they were intended.

Inevitably, some people will end up with a backup file, a ruined site and a problem in the restoration procedure they can't work out. Almost always, the recipe includes a pressing deadline which requires that the site is on-line... yesterday. If you are in a situation like the one we just described, breathe. Do not panic. We've got you covered, with this concise manual site restoration guide. So, here it goes... it's manual Joomla! Site restoration In 7 steps or even less.

Step 1. Making sure it won't get worse.

Assuming such a situation, it's only human to be in panic and despair. Panic is a bad counsellor. It will give you wrong advice. Despair will only make you careless. So, people, get it together! Make a backup of the only thing separating you from complete disaster: the backup file. Burn it on a CD. Write it on your USB key. Put it on a couple of locations on your file server. Just make sure you'll have an extra copy in case you screw up.

This exercise has been proven to lower the probability of anything going wrong. Furthermore, it's good for your psychology. It gives you a sense of security you didn't have five minutes ago.

Step 2. Extracting the archive.

Now, we have to extract the archive somewhere on your local hard drive.

If the archive is of the JPA type, you'll have to use the JoomlaPack UnJPA command line utility from the JPA utilities (jpa_utils) package.

If you have a ZIP package, there are a couple of gotchas. If you are working on a Linux machine, unzip will work just fine. If you're on Windows and under certain configuration circumstances on the server you took the backup on, you might not be able to extract it with WinZIP, WinRAR, 7-Zip or other archiver software. So you'll have to use JoomlaPack UnZIP from the JPA utilities (jpa_utils) package.

Another possibility for extracting both JPA and ZIP backup archives on your local PC is to use eXtract. This is a GUI utility, part of our Native Tools distribution, which allows direct extraction of backup archives on your Windows™ PC. It is possible to run it under other operating systems, such as Mac OS X™ and Linux™, using DarWINE and WINE respectively. Please refer to the eXtract documentation, available on-line on our site, for more information on using it.

Step 3. Editing your database backup.

Take a look at the directory where you extracted your backup archive. Inside it there is a directory named installation. Inside this, there is a subdirectory named sql. Inside this there is a file, joomla.sql, containing your database data. COPY THIS TO ANOTHER LOCATION NOW! We'll have to edit it, so please, don't tamper with the original, will you?

Open the copy of joomla.sql. Use a text editor (we recommend gedit and Kate on Linux™, Notepad++ on Windows™; do not use Wordpad or Word!). If you were ever familiar with SQL, you'll recognize that each line consists of a single SQL command. But they have a problem: table names are mangled. You'll see that tables are in a form similar to #__banner instead of jos_banner. Ah, nice! We'll have to fix that.

Using your text editors Replace command, do the following changes:

The idea is to replace all instances of #__ (note that there are two underscores after the hash sign) with jos_ in the MySQL command part (not the data part). Easy, wasn't it? NOW SAVE THAT FILE!

Step 4. Restoring the database.

In order to restore the database on the server you'll have to use some appropriate tool. For small to moderately sized database dumps (up to 2Mb), we find that phpMyAdmin does the trick pretty well, plus it's installed on virtually all PHP enabled commercial hosts. For larger dumps, we found that bigdump.php from Alexey Ozerov works wonders. Use either of those tools - or any other of your liking - to restore your database.

If the restoration gets stuck with SQL errors on some CREATE TABLE command, it seems that you are restoring to a server with an older MySQL version than the one you took the backup from. In this case, if you have still access to the original site, you can perform a new JoomlaPack backup with the database compatibility mode set to MySQL 4 and start over. You did read the User Guide section on configuration options, right?

If you don't have access to the original site... Oh, this is gonna be such a long night. In a nutshell, you have two options: a) Edit all of the CREATE TABLE commands, eliminating everything between the last parenthesis and the semi-colon of each command. b) Set up a MySQL 5 enabled local server (for example, XAMPP, WAMP, LAMPP, MAMP, depending on your operating system), restore the site in there, take a backup with the database compatibility mode set to MySQL 4 and start over.

Step 5. Upload your site's files.

First of all, delete the installation subdirectory from the directory you extracted the backup archive to. We won't be needing this any more. Then, using FTP - or any method you please - upload all of the files to the target server.

If you want to be thorough remember to set the directory and file permissions accordingly. If you just want to get the damn thing on-line ASAP, just skip this permissions thing; it will remind you of itself as soon as you try to do some website administration (like uploading a picture) after the site's back on-line.

Step 6. Edit configuration.php, if necessary.

If you were restoring to the same server location you took the backup on, nothing else is necessary. Your site should be back on-line now. If not, you'll have to edit the configuration.php.

You have Joomla! 1.5.x. Good news! Joomla! 1.5.x doesn't require you to specify some of the hard-to-obtain parameters. Your configuration.php consists of several lines. Each one is in the following form:

var $key = "value";

The key is the name of the configuration variable and value (inside double quotes!) is the value of the variable. Below we provide a list of the configuration variables which have to be modified to get up on-line.

That's all! You're good to go.

Step 7. Enjoy success.

Your mission is accomplished. You are exhausted. Go drink whatever is your favourite drink and enjoy sweet success!