I agree with the idea that you might be at the point where having the host do the migration for you, or hiring someone to do it from
the Wanted! forum, might be the most productive salvage of the time you have already spent. Not that you can't still do it yourself, but the frustration may be as challenging an obstacle as the technical requirements at this point.
doughs wrote: ↑Wed Jan 16, 2019 1:04 am
So I have about 45000 files, most of which have names like:
viewtopic.php_p=70618
viewtopic.php_p=71190
viewtopic.php_p=71342
viewtopic.php_p=72716
viewtopic.php_p=70473
etc.
Those particular filenames suggest that WGET was invoked to traverse the HTTP structure of your site, instead of using FTP access. With FTP access, you would have downloaded primarily .PHP files and data files, which are the "source code" and uploaded files used by phpBB to present the content of the site. Traversing the site via HTTP, on the other hand, is saving all the HTML data that is
generated by these .PHP files to visually present the site to web browsers, rather than downloading the .PHP file itself. Downloading the HTML data is more like "taking screen shots of every discussion thread on your site" rather than making a backup of the site.
You or the support team helping you may have also downloaded your entire site via FTP, such that you already also have a good backup; we don't know for sure. I'm just confirming to you that these "viewtopic.php_p=7xxxx"-type files you mentioned don't represent the actual "source" files that would have been downloaded as part of an FTP-based backup, and those "viewtopic.php_p=7xxxx"-type files themselves don't represent any kind of "backup" you want to bother restoring to the new site.
But maybe the "real backup" is also there, hiding among the same large set of files you have. Because maybe you or the support staff assisting you did also perform an FTP-based download in addition to the HTTP-based download.
So that is probably the first thing to check: Within your backup do you have a set of directories that look more like the directory structure you see inside the .ZIP file if you
download the full phpBB 3.2.5 installation set. Specifically at least the /files/, /images/, /store/ and /ext/ directories of the "old" site, if not simply "all" of the directories. If you don't have an FTP-based backup of those directories already, you probably want to get such a backup before you lose access to the old site (if that hasn't already happened).
In addition to the file system backup via FTP, you also need a backup of the SQL database. This database backup could have been created from within phpBB in the ACP's "Maintenance" tab for making database backups, or could have been created from an SQL management tool provided by your server host to export the current database contents. In either case, you end up with a single text file that represents the database backup, and inside that single text file are the scores of SQL commands needed to re-create your database tables and their contents.
I'm going to just stop there for now; while you assess whether you even have an FTP-based file system backup of your previous site, versus maybe only having the HTTP-based traversal of your site. Since that will pretty much dictate what needs to happen next. If you're still unsure of what files you really have, then perhaps this task too is one you want to try and get your new hosting copy to do for you, or to be part of the task you would hire out to
the Wanted! forum.
Best of luck. Definitely not something that is necessarily obvious or intuitive, particularly when web-based PHP applications are otherwise not something you've had the necessity to manage.