3.2 to 3.3 upgrade

[Hermskii]

Original topic: viewtopic.php?t=2520036

It is going very badly for me and my forum and doing so very quickly. I did the SSH backup which I have no idea what SSH is, but the directions were clear enough. I went into my forums ACP. I went to the maintenance tab and selected backup. I did both a local and a download backup. I selected the gzip option and selected all files.

Does that mean I backed up the database and the files? My backup is 55,220kb in size.

I tried to do the 3.2 to 3.3 upgrade. Turns out my forum is running on 5.4 php and it is supposed to run on 7.2 which is supposed to be installed ahead of time. Mine was not so it has gone terribly wrong. I'm now just hopeful to be able to restore from backup I have godaddy do regularly. They tried and failed.

So, before I try further with them to use their backup, I have more questions based on what they told me being:

Your support ticket has been updated.

Update details:
Subject: Forum

Message:

Dear valued customer,

Thank you for reaching out to the Website Security Team.

I'm sorry to hear about the experience you had with your website. I also further reviewed your request and it seems you only wanted to restore a specific folder and its database on your website. Can you confirm if you only wanted to restore the /forum folder located inside the public_html folder and its database or whole files inside the /public_html?

We'll be glad to assist you with the restoration of your website however, It's very important to us to have the right information before doing the restoration to avoid any issues.

Could you please provide us with more information so we can continue the process?

Domain:
The backup date we are restoring from:
Restore Files (y/n):
Restore Database (y/n):
Permission to overwrite existing content (y/n):

Your permission is required because a restore permanently overwrites your current site. Any version of your site that isn't backed up may be lost and this action cannot be undone.

For more information:

https://www.godaddy.com/help/restore-my ... kups-27785

Due to the nature of this case, we will place this ticket in "Waiting For User" status until we hear back from you.

If you have any questions or concerns please reply to this support ticket.

Have a great day!

Kind Regards,

Analyst - Website Security Support I



I am unsure how to answer and am most concerned with keeping the data that is my forum intact so that in a worst case scenario, I can restore it somewhere else and pick up where I left off. Any ideas here?

If they have a full backup of my entire website which includes the forum from 1-week ago, can't they restore it with no risk to the data? That is what I thought I was having them do but they keep saying to restore failed. I'm so mad and confused I can't think.

[danieltj]

I split your post from your original topic because the phpBB Discussion forum isn't for this kind of support and I suspect based on your post there is probably a lot of work involved to get your forum working.

Can you post a link to your forum and explain what has actually gone wrong so far, as in what error messages are you seeing at the moment? I suspect that if you were on php 5 before you attempted the upgrade that in theory something should have broken and stopped anything being updated on the database side so you're still technically on phpBB 3.2 (I think).

Do you have local copies of your forums files and database? If so, you should be able to restore your forum to the pre-update state which should make things much easier the next time you attempt the update.

[Hermskii]

danieltj,

I have been given lots of info on this and am confused by much of it. I am not a web guy but know I need to upgrade every once in a while to keep the bad-guys away and from messing up my website and forum.

Thank you for moving this into its own thread. There are several ways to get to my forum:
Click on this link to go to my website: https://hermskii.com/
Then click on the Forums tab on the left which will take you to this page: https://hermskii.com/page5.html
Then click on red "House of Hermskii {HOH} Forum" link which will take you to my forum at https://hermskii.com/forum/

As you can see, the website itself is still fine but my forum's Index page says:

This forum is closed right now to be moved to a new web-hosting provider! Please visit http://hooksutplace.freeforums.org until further notice. Thank you!

I have no idea where that line came from. It must have been an old my forum is down right now message I used a long-long time ago.

The first error I got after I tried to upgrade from 3.2 to 3.3 was:

You are running an unsupported PHP version (5.4.45). Please upgrade to PHP 7.2.0 or higher before trying to install or update to phpBB 3.3

I then called GoDaddy and asked them to restore my website thinking that included the forum.

They said they did and the 1 line you see on the forum page is all that it has now. I replied on the email they sent me saying my stuff was fully restored and told them no it wasn't. Then they looked at the ticket closer and saw I meant for them to restore the forum folder thinking that would at least get me back to where I was before I started and thus no harm done.

That is when they sent me this letter asking me all this other stuff.

GoDaddy says my forum is running on PHP 5.4 right now.

I did a download backup to a gzip file on my computer that included the select all files option. I don't know it that means I have a copy of all that you need.

You asked "Do you have local copies of your forums files and database? If so, you should be able to restore your forum to the pre-update state which should make things much easier the next time you attempt the update."

To which I answer again that I honestly don't know but if GoDaddy has a backup from every day for the last month of my website and folders and files and all of that, doesn't that mean they have a full backup of everything?

I hope I answered all of your questions. I may have gone a little overboard, but I like to be as clear as I can to people as I like them to do the same to me.


Thank you for your help.

[warmweer]

Then click on red "House of Hermskii {HOH} Forum" link which will take you to my forum at https://hermskii.com/forum/

That is your original forum but it's currently disabled, but for the founder and perhaps some administrators.

The prosilver version =3.2.3

This forum is closed right now to be moved to a new web-hosting provider! Please visit http://hooksutplace.freeforums.org until further notice. Thank you!

That's a proboards forum but AFAIK cannot be restored to a phpBB board ... Well it is partly possible with manual alterations but a real PITA ( I started on a manual conversion of a proboards forum about 2 and a half years ago but after about 2 months of suffering decided to create a new phpBB board and transfer the users, topics and posts (about 300 topics) manually.
AFAIR there's no way to take a database backup on proboards so if a complete transfer was done and no backup of phpBB kept, your only option is to use an old backup to restore the phpBB

What you should do immediately is to take a full file backup of https://hermskii.com/forum/ (save it to your PC)

Then log in to your board, check which phpBB version is mentioned in the ACP and see if you can take a database backup.

To be honest ... reading this topic I think you should post in the Wanted! area and let someone with experience figure it out (implying having at a minimum FTP access and preferably an admin account on your (original) board.

[thecoalman]

As you can see, the website itself is still fine but my forum's Index page says:

This forum is closed right now to be moved to a new web-hosting provider! Please visit http://hooksutplace.freeforums.org until further notice. Thank you!

You should be able to login into the ACP, click the Server settings link on left and then set "Disable board:" to no. The message used is in text box below, you change that too if you want.

Determine if the backup used is correct and up to date.

[invenio]

I did the SSH backup which I have no idea what SSH is, but the directions were clear enough. I went into my forums ACP. I went to the maintenance tab and selected backup. I did both a local and a download backup. I selected the gzip option and selected all files.

Does that mean I backed up the database and the files? My backup is 55,220kb in size.

No, you need more than just the database for a full backup of your board.

Here are the instructions on how to do a full backup of the board: https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/en/3 ... tructions/

[Hermskii]

Luckily, GoDaddy said they are going to hold and take no action until I tell them what I want them to try next. I say that is good because I'm going out of town in just a few hours and will be nearly totally off-grid until Monday, December 30, 2024. I will be able to once again give this the proper attention it needs then. Thanks all.

I am the founder and only administrator to this forum. I don't see how I can log in to it and do as one of you mentioned being there is no link at the bottom that would take me to the admin control panel like there usually is.

That one line mentioning to go to HOOKSUT place was just there to tell my members they could still hang out and talk at HOOK's place. I did not move my forum over to his provider nor was I trying to. My forum used to be on a place called bluehost. About 15 years back I deleted 25 members by accident and asked them to restore from backup and they could not. That made me very mad at bluehost so i left them and came to GoDaddy where this forum resides now. Sad and not funny how now, for the first time since then, I need a restore again and again, I'm having issues with this. I still feel very strongly that I should be able to have GoDaddy quickly and restore everything to a week as though none of this happened and yet I'm having to go through all of this. I suspect I will be leaving GoDaddy soon enough too now for another hosting service that can actually do a restore from backup.

By the way, I did a Forum Backup using these instructions before I ever changed anything:

Option C: Via the phpBB ACP

1) In the ACP, go to the "maintenance" tab, then "Backup" under the "Database" group on the left hand selection column.

2) "Full", "gzip", and "Store File Locally" should be selected.

3) Click on "Select All" under the "Table Select" list box.

4) Click on "Submit".

This will generate a backup of the database and place it in the
Code: Select all

/store
folder on your server. The next set of instructions will allow you to download this database backup with the other needed files for backup.


I also downloaded that same backup to my personal computer.

[invenio]

You still need to download the forum's files as explained in the KB article, not just the database in the /store folder. I hope you also did that.

As for your issue with Bluehost about not being able to restore the users you deleted, they would only be able to role back your entire site if you had an automatic backup plan purchased with them. Same for GoDaddy or any other hosting service. If your host is not doing site backups, then there would be nothing they can do to restore your site to a previous state. If this is important to you (and you don't want to do the backups yourself), I would highly recommend that you buy a backup service at your new hosting once transferred. It is incredibly dangerous to go without backups as you risk losing your forum forever if something happens to the database or files.

[Hermskii]

I did pay for and have site backups at blue host and all I wanted them to do was restore it to a couple days before I messed up. They couldn't do it. So I quit them and went to GoDaddy where I also have paid for site backup they call Secure backup or something like that. That is why I'm mad. They should be able to simply do a full restore from 1 week ago and all of this would go away and yet they are having trouble.

[invenio]

If they can't provide the service that you paid for then I would ask for a refund.

Obviously, that doesn't help you now, but still. I would make sure you have a good complete backup of the site before transferring to a new host.

I would also just backup the entire file structure to make the transfer easier, then you don't have to go through the hassle of downloading the install package and any extensions. The KB article on the backup is really designed to allow you to restore in case of a catastrophic event, not necessarily for simplicity of the restore. There may also be other files there that you may want to keep long term (like site visit statistics files that often hosts will generate themselves).

[thecoalman]

I am the founder and only administrator to this forum. I don't see how I can log in to it and do as one of you mentioned being there is no link at the bottom that would take me to the admin control panel like there usually is.

You need to be logged into the forum first, then the ink will appear. There should be one in top navigation bar too but perhaps that style doesn't have it.

If for whatever reason you can't login you run this SQL in phpMyadmin:

Code: Select all

UPDATE `phpbb_config` SET `config_value` = '0' WHERE `phpbb_config`.`config_name` = 'board_disable'; 

Check to see if the correct backup was restored.

About 15 years back I deleted 25 members by accident and asked them to restore from backup and they could not. That made me very mad at bluehost so i left them and came to GoDaddy where this forum resides now. Sad and not funny how now, for the first time since then, I need a restore again and again, I'm having issues with this. I still feel very strongly that I should be able to have GoDaddy quickly and restore everything to a week as though none of this happened and yet I'm having to go through all of this. I suspect I will be leaving GoDaddy soon enough too now for another hosting service that can actually do a restore from backup.

If you aren't specifically paying a premium for backup it's not a robust backup. The "backup" on cheap shared hosting is usually only disaster recovery they have for their own needs and typically out of date for a few days. Servers are usually using RAID5 configuration which provides performance and redundancy for loss of one disk, when a disk fails they replace it and it's rebuilt from the other disks. However loss or corruption of two disks is unrecoverable. That is where the disaster recovery backup comes in.

[Hermskii]

I'm back in town now and ready.

To warmweer: You said to do a full file backup of the hermskii.com/forum/ to which I say, I have done so. I have a copy of the entire Forum folder on my personal computer, and I did the select all files GZIP backup from the maintenance tab of my ACP and have it locally on my PC as well.

I did find that I could log into my ACP even though the board shows to be disable right now. It is PHPBB 3.2.3. and like I mentioned above, I just did the database backup. I did it and have it from right before I broke everything too! I have a one back to 12/23/24 in fact. I agree, I should hire someone to help and likely will.

To the coalman: I was able to log into the ACP like you said but when I went to the Server Settings on the left, there was no Disable Board option however, under Board Configuration, Board Settings tab on the left, there was an option on the right that said "Disable Board" where the option to Disable Board was already set to no. Note that on the General Tab, and Under the Welcome to PHPBB section there was a warning saying to please delete the Install directory before using the board otherwise only admins and the control panel would be accessible. Note that wasn't done yet because the error that popped up before said the board had other issues like not having the needed version of PHP installed. I never made it to the delete the Install folder part. I was able to change the outgoing message to explain why my little PHPBB board is down right now. Thanks! Then you said: Determine if the backup used is correct and up to date. to which I say how?

To invenio: Thanks. I used the directions you gave and did the full backup. I have done my own backups before and I do pay GoDaddy extra to keep 30-days of backups. THAT IS WHY I"M SO MAD! They should just restore the folder called FORUM and the database and I should be back to like this never happened. They keep saying an error happened during the restore and are still trying to figure out what the problem is.

So, there it is people! I think I have done everything I was told to do and answered any questions people had. I called GoDaddy again and chewed them again for not having this fixed yet. I have asked to do a restore back to 12/23/24 and demanded they keep copies of all of my restore points back to 11/26/24 which is the first date of a restore not working. I'll be damned if they say they ran out of time because they ran out of backups like Bluehost did. Thanks again to all of you. Now, since I expect them to try another backup tonight or tomorrow, I'm going to go ahead and delete the install directory just to see what happens!

[Hermskii]

Well, well, well,

Look at that! I nuked the install folder and the site came back up. It is restored from before Christmas so it is missing much of the cleanup I had done before trying to upgrade it but it works! Now, I can take my time and do this right and learn a little. Recall, I have upgraded this site many times in the past but it has been a while and things did change since my last one.

GoDaddy tells me that if I upgrade my forum's version of PHP from 5.45 to 7.2 which s required for me to go from PHPBB 3.2.3 to PHPBB 3.3.14.

That said, how do I proceed without breaking it again?

[thecoalman]

The specific direction are here for upgrading from 3.2.X to 3.3.X

https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/en/3 ... upgrade32/

After step 3 you can try and restore your backup of the DB so it's up to date. The backup file you created previously needs to be in the /store folder.

When you get to step 9 switch the php version. If you do not have any other applications dependent on php version you can use php 8.2 or 8.3.

[Hermskii]

Thank you for all of your help so far. After I got my board working again, I redid the work I had done before that I had lost, meaning, I think I no longer care about the backup file I had created and put in the Store folder. That said, in my head, I'm thinking I'm starting from scratch to upgrade from PHP 5.45 and PHPBB 3.2.3 which I know means I need to upgrade my PHP to at least 7.2 to support the latest PHPBB of 3.3.14 .

How do I know if I have any mods installed?

Say everything is going just fine and I get to Step 9. At that point, you said to:

When you get to step 9 switch the php version.

I thought I have to call GoDaddy and ask them to do the PHP version upgrade to 7.2 and I read in other places here where people went ahead and upgraded all the way up to 8.2 or something like that. Should I go all the way up too?

My site is up and working right now at HTTPS://hermskii.com/forum if you want to look around.