Data backup and migration of 3.0.2 to 3.0.5 both failed!

[rmdstudio]

Support Request Template
What version of phpBB are you using? phpBB 3.0.2
What is your board's URL? http://forum.tazzu.com
Who do you host your board with? MediaTemple.com
How did you install your board? I used the download package from phpBB.com
Is your board a fresh install or a conversion? Conversion from phpBB2
Do you have any MODs installed? No
When did your problem begin? After several failed attempts to upgrade from 3.0.2 to 3.0.5
Please describe your problem. Hello,

1. I created a database backup using the Maintainance > Back up feature. I backed up all tables.

2. backed up all the files on the server

3. uploaded the 3.0.5 automatic upgrade package. The it worked fine, until the database data upgrade hand on me

4. I resotred the files to the original and also resotred the database using Maintainance > Restore in phpbb3

Now when I click on many topics, the posts won't show. It says that they don't exist. I've wrote a query manually in phpMyAdmin:

SELECT *
FROM `phpbb_posts`
WHERE `topic_id` =3619

and nothing comes back. All the post data have vanished.

I've also noticed that the size of backup files have been reduced to 4.5 MB from 53MB
What styles do you currently have installed? our own custom style
What language(s) is your board currently using? English
Which database type/version are you using? MySQL 4
What is your level of experience? Experienced with PHP and phpBB
Generated by SRT Generator ($Rev: 3036 $)

I appreicate any comments please,

Kind regards,

Rastin

[stevemaury]

There is no need to either backup or restore the database. It appears that your backup was incomplete and when you restored it, you wiped out the database. Post here the last 20 lines of your database backup file.

[rmdstudio]

Hello, thank you for reply. I don't think i can post the last 20 lines, it contains a lot of text + user passwords!

but I did snoop more inside the database and have realized a lot of posts are missing. Seems like the php execution_time had timed out and resulted into an incomplete backup, which is sad indeed we've had over 15,000 posts and the community is indeed heartbroken.

I should have done it the old fashion way and gotten a direct mysqldump instead of using the Maintenance > Backup.

Question: what is the most graceful way to clean up the old data and keep what's left? Can I just write a script to remove topics without any posts? or there are more dependancies in place as well?

and also the database migration of 3.0.2 to 3.0.5 still remains to be an issue. Did that happen becuase of the execution_time as well?

Kind regards

[stevemaury]

If the end of the backup looks like that then yes,it is incomplete.

It it time out at the posts table, then all your users are gone too. Sorry to tell you this but there is no way to restore this.

EDIT

Perhaps your host has a recent backup.

[rmdstudio]

Actually all the user seem to be in the system, only their posts have been lost, which makes sense the largest records belonged to the posts and that's where the time out happened. I am going to check and see whether the hosting company has any records.

[rmdstudio]

I think it would be a good idea of PHPBB3 checks for max_execution_time in the server's php.ini setting before doing operations that might take more time, such as backup, restore, upload, etc.

[stevemaury]

The tables are backed up alphabetically. So what happened was that your backup timed out at the posts table and when you went to restore it, it deleted and the created every table down to and including posts (partially), leaving intact all the tables after posts in the alphabet. In theory, then, the board should come back just fine, minus those posts.

Before restoring a database backup, one should look at it to see if it is complete.

[rmdstudio]

Thank you!

There is a chance that MediaTemple can give me a mysqldump from June 11th which isn't that bad. Thankfully the forum traffic was a bit slow in the past month. They are asking for 120$ per hour fee though.

After that I need to resolve the forum migration from 3.0.2 to 3.0.5 becuase the database data update hanged on me several times.

I think I might upgrade to 3.0.4 first and then upgrade to 3.0.5!