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Hi guys, I posted this on joomla.net but thought I'd try here.

A couple of months ago one of my HDD's was dying so I quickly made a backup of the whole xampp directory. I had also made a backup of the whole site using Joomlapack. However, when I had a look at the backup zip file yesterday it has a size of 0. I'm sure this wasn't the case when I did the backup, so not sure what went wrong there. Is there a way to get my site back up and running with the xampp directory backup? I really don't want to start from scratch again :(

Help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Mark

Did you open your zip-file with the JoomlaPack tool?

No, I used winrar but the file size is zero, so winrar is unable to open it. When I did backups before I was able to open them with winrar.

The zero byte file would indicate that it isn't our "normal" zip error where the CRC32 values are wrong.

You have half of the site with the xamp directory backup. The missing part is the database. That would contain all your articles, users, etc. If the drive is gone, I don't know of any way to recover that data. If you still have the ability to dump the database, you have the pieces that you need. Is the MySQL data stored on the same drive as the xamp data?

Dale

There is a mysql folder inside the xampp directory, so I have a backup of the whole site. Is there a way to possibly reconstruct the zip file manually?

This is turning out better than I expected. Inside the mysql folder are folders with the names of your databases. I successfully moved one of mine from one machine to another by copying the database folder itself. This is way over my head in MySQL, I don't know if that is supposed to be possible or not. I did it, I can access the data tables from the target machine (as root). You are going to have to do that on a local machine running MySQL because you won't have access to the folder on a commercial host. If you can get to a point where you can see that database with phpMyAdmin or a similar utility, you have all the parts to put the site back together.

Where are we going with the site? Are you moving it to another local server or to a commercial host? If we're going to a local server, we just want to restore the files to that server and connect the site to the database. It will take a little more doing to get it to a commercial host. I don't think the goal is to recreate the zip file either way. :D

Dale

Thanks for you help Dale.

I managed to get it working another way. What I did was install xampp in the same directory as it was installed in before. I then removed the newly created xampp directory and copied accross the backup I had from my other hard drive. Restarted the apache and mysql services.

I'm glad you got it working! :D

Dale