start over with clean install but keep some data

By sgwealti on 22 Mar 2006 at 06:09 UTC

I'm running an older version of drupal, I believe it's 4.5.5 or so but I don't know because I can't find anywhere where it displays what version I'm running. I started out on 4.4.something and I've upgraded several times over the past year. Not all of the upgrades have been successful but for various reasons I had to keep the site going even though everything wasn't working right. Now I'm at a point where a lot of stuff is broken and I'm pretty sure it's because of things that have broken in the upgrade process at one point or another. I'd like to start over with a clean install of 4.6.6 but I need to keep my nodes, taxonomy, users and uploaded files. Is there any way I can do this? The only non-base modules I'm using that I need to worry about are inline which I use for all of my images (which is why I need to keep the uploaded files), pathauto and taxonomy block. I also have a phptemplate based theme that I want to keep. Any suggestions, pointers or recommendatiosn would be greatly appreciated.

Comments

Import

Ralf Saalmueller commented 22 March 2006 at 07:56

In the first place it looks like a very good idea to start with a fresh and clean install and than to import what's important. Users, nodes in first place.

Sad thing that durpal doesn't support this out of the box. You can "tune" your drupal database. There is NO evidence that the database is correct when the drupal update.php starts to alter it. Would it be that complex to build a new, clean database structure for the new system and import the old data?

Even if you think a database is a database and it's task is to handle data (import and export too), you might find that drupal doesn't like it if you add data without drupal. Even if you import the user base and the nodes via mysql and correct the node and user counter, I ran into an unusable installation. Looks like drupal tracks a lot more.

There is a import module at http://drupal.org/node/14858

I haven't tested it yet, but two efforts to bring my site from 4.6.6 to version 4.7 ended in a broken system (on a spare testing system), i've three basic choices. Stay in the dust with 4.6. Get the import module to work in 4.7. Switch to another cms. Even if it isn't a cms in the first place, I like eGroupware very much. Just imagine how simple drupal would be if it just set up like eGroupware?

PS. Just noticed that the last version of the import module is rather old. Perhaps already outdated?

Yes, outdated

heisters commented 22 March 2006 at 21:26

It looks like that module's latest release is only for 4.5.0. I would really like to be able to do this, even if it meant I just copied data in using MySQL. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get content from a 4.5 installation into a clean 4.6 installation? I also only need users and personal blog entries.

I got it to work

sgwealti commented 24 April 2006 at 12:32

Basically what I did was started with a clean install of 4.6.something and that created a bunch of empty tables in a new database. Then I exported tables one at a time with phpmyadmin and imported them into the equivalent table in the new database. At the minimum you probably need the users table, roles, access, and taxonomy tables, oh yeah, and of course nodes. It was fairly straightforward. Let me know if you need more detailed information than this.