Nothing restored

I don't know if my problem is the same or not, but I exported my site as a zip and tried to restore it later. It reported success but 0 queries run. I tried opening the zip to see if the compression was the problem, and Windows reported error reading the file.

The reporting is a little dumb in declaring success as it considers the restore a success if there were no errors. If there were simply no valid sql statements run you'd probably get a success message.

a.bond: in your case you probably have a corrupt download. Try using gzip or no compression and seeing if it works better.

wmike: I'm not sure what the issue is. Are you using compression? Do they decompress successfully using other tools (command line, winzip, etc.)? If you open the decompresses dumps in a text editor can you see sql statements? Are line endings right (should be unix style).

Thanks
ronan

Sometimes it works better if I use no compression, sometimes it only works if I upload it to the manual backups directory and restore it from there.

I have this problem with and without compression. After it is done, it says 5864 SQL commands executed, but nothing restores. In my case, I'm taking a backup from production and importing into a site I have set up on my localhost.

Well, I figured out that it was because my prod site uses a prefix in the database and my test site did not. I changed the settings.php in my test site to include the prefix and it all worked. For anyone that reads this, these simple things seem to be the hardest for my to figure out so far in Drupal. There are so many settings it is easy to forget one, and one this issue, I couldn't find any forum topic this 'boneheaded' nor did I see anything mentioned in any backup/restore documentation like "make sure both sites use the same prefix".

A corollary to this is that so far, I've found great instructions on new tasks and more complicated problems.

So I guess my $.02 for the gurus out there, please don't forget to mention some of the basics. I know that is easy to do when you know the subject matter so well.

Thanks!

Don

PS I'm loving Drupal. A lot.

Glad you got this figured out, and thanks for the feedback. Ultimately I would like this module to be able to handle different db prefixes automatically, but the task has never made it very high on my todo list (and is also much harder than it sounds).

In the mean time I should find a user friendly way to warn users about this potential issue.

Thanks
Ronan

Thank you for this!!
I was starting to tear my hair out trying to figure out what was going on here.
Changing the db prefix fix everything. Yeah!

Uhhhh guys, I am totally new on this... Could anyone advise exactly how we change the DB prefix in settings.php? what do I need to find out to change from/to? I am trying to migrate my site from one hosting provider to another.

OK to feedback - I have figured this out and sucessfully migrated the site to another host. Simply,
- you need to open up the Settings.php file is found in the directory: /sites/default for both sites.
- Search for the string: $db_prefix
- Edit the Settings.php file on the destination site;- ensure that any prefix specified in your source site (where you are moving from/backup up from) is the same as the destination (where you are moving to/restoring to).
- You may need to change the permissions of the Settings.php file so you can write to it. Remember to change it back after editing.