Pretty Faces, Dirty Feet

About a month ago, my wiki installation vanished off the web host’s directory structure. Not sure why. Maybe I should look for a new host. I’m betting it was a bad backup and restore process. And restore processes are what this post is about.

Software often has a pretty face; it needs to to succeed in the market place. Yet, I’m getting frustrated with the back end support. I did complete SQL data dumps of my wiki regularly. I probably should have taken notice when the software backup scripts were labeled “These will probably not work.” Instead of use them, I did SQL statement dumps of the database using phpMyAdmin. Problem is, I never exercised the restore process. The bottom line of my frustration is that, after 3 days and probably 5-6 hours of mucking around, I’ve reached the conclusion there really is no restore process.

I have a v1.9 Tikiwiki installation, in as much as the php scripts are in place. But I have no database behind the install. My v1.8 database was blown away (part of the original problem). The backup I have is a 9 MB text file of SQL statements that can re-insert the v1.8 database data, but that’s not useful with a v1.9 virgin database because the tables are defined differently. I guess I need to go learn how to handle MySQL better on a remote server, and then use my backup script to create and populate a v1.8 database,so that I can then run the v1.8-to-v1.9 conversion scripts, so that the new v1.9 php scripts can run the wiki.

Sheesh..

Seven hours later. The wiki is up and running. Yea.. I know a lot more aby MySQL. Is a working web page worth the hours of time it takes? Answers were found at the upgrade pages for Tikiwiki (not surprisingly). It took me several hours to put my v1.8 script back on the remote server, and about half an hour of dabbling to find a username and password combination that MySQL, php, and Tikiwiki all agreed on. The 9 MB script executed into MySQL with no errors using “mysql -p -u username databasename

[okay, I’ve had it for the day. The “new and fancy” blog editor just ate up my back-carat character on the previous line, and deleted the reset of my post as a mal-formed html tag. Grrrooowwwl… ]