Last week I had a server crash — hardware problems — and have spent the past week recovering. I had several php apps running on the server along with a lot of static content–including a couple thousand videos. So I spent a day rebuilding the server on a new box and restoring the static content was a breeze–really drove home the point for me about the value of keeping things simple. 500+ videos were just uploaded into a directory and were not part of a php app–very simple to restore. However, the vast majority of my content was tied to a couple Moodle LMS installs, several WordPress installs including one WordPress Mu install, and five MedaiWiki installs.

Fortunately, I was able to recover the data from the crashed box, but not all of it was in a format that I am accustomed to dealing with…specifically the MySql databases. I’m very comfortable working with MySql database dumps, unfortunately, the latest .sql dump I had of each of my DB’s was over a month old and my server backups were not running — long story

So, I was stuck with restoring my php apps using the database files from the file system.

After a little web-searching and a little common sense, I was able to easily enough restore all my MyISAM databases. My Moodle and WordPress sites were all using MyISAM. So, on my new server, I simple created new db’s, navigated to the db directory on the server and then copied the .frm, .myd, and .myi files to the directory. This resulted in a db that I could then see via phpMyAdmin, but all the tables were read-only. The simple fix to that problem was to then dump the db to an .sql file, drop the tables, and import the .sql file — only a few minutes work and back in business.

The solution to the Innodb databases was not so intuitive — my Mediawiki sites were all innodb. There were database directories in the mysql folder for these just like all the other db’s, but they only contained the .frm files for most of the tables — I think two tables were actually MyISAM and had all three files. So, the process I used to recover the MyISAM db’s didn’t work on these db’s. After about three days of work, Google searching, and plain old trial-and-error, I finally figured out how to recover the Innodb databases as well. In short, I installed a fresh copy of XAMPP on my local computer, moved over the db directories from the crashed server (the ones with just the .frm files) and moved over the ibdata and ib log files — three files total — and then the db’s were recreated in XAMPP. This allowed me to dump them as an .sql file and from there I was good to go. Note, that working in XAMPP wasn’t absolutely necessary, but it allowed me to work in an offline environment and get to the end result of creating .sql dumps that I could then import into my live site. Needless to say, when I restored my Mediawiki sites, I made sure the db’s were MyISAM — in my opinion, a lot easier to work with.

I’ll make a video in the next few weeks detailing how I did this — not only to help others, but to also to document my own process just in case I’m confronted with this issue in the future.

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