Monopoly Junior Chance Card SmallAid The Beat and the Elite Beat Squad! We’re trying to import the old posts from the Old Beat, so we can shut down the site completely, but the old server won’t allow us to download the entire back-up file, either via the WordPress back-up plug-in or the MySQL database. I asked customer support on the old site and they said it was a bandwidth issue with our provider, but it is exactly the same on every system we try.

Some people said we could break it up into parts, but no one has said how. Any ideas out there, group mind?

10 COMMENTS

  1. Are you getting an error message, or just an incomplete file? Is the file well formed, and just missing some posts, or does it cut off in the middle (IE, does it end in /xml, or whatever the opening tag is). If it breaks in the middle, does it always break at the same place?

    Do you have shell access to the server that hosts the old site?

  2. Kind of a drastic measure, especially given that there’s no guarantee it would work, but deleting all comments from the old site might make it “small” enough to download the backup.

    Another possibility, assuming you are using Tools/Export to download the backup file (which downloads a complete .XML file of a given site), is to do a separate download for each author. To do that, simply go to Tools/Export, then select each author individually from the “Restrict Author” option, and repeat.

    Not entirely sure if this is possible using WordPress.org self-hosted blogs; I’m only familiar with the WordPress.com-hosted variety. Anyhow, good luck!

  3. Heidi – I was a web developer and PHP programmer for a while before I developed a taste for poverty/cartooning and I’ve got tons of experience wrestling with WordPress. I can’t make any guarantees, but I’m happy to have a go at some troubleshooting. Just shoot me an email.

    -Ben

  4. We had the same problem- I downloaded WP-DBManager and started exporting it in chunks by date. We had to experiment to see how big of a chunk we could export at a time, and it ended up being about 6 month chunks at a time over our 4ish year history. It took a while, but it worked.

  5. Not an expert, but why not export the files as compressed text to transportable physical media? (For example, a Time Machine will accomodate up to 1 TB of data.) Use a program such as Stuffit to create the compressed archives. Then connect the media to the new server, expand the files, and upload same to the new site. Just a thought….

  6. The easiest way to do this is to export the older blog one category at a time. The only way you can do this is to bulk edit posts, temporarily assigning a new author to each post based on category. Once you’ve imported the posts, you can then once again bulk edit to show the correct author.

    You will also need to have ftp privileges over at the old Beat. You’ll need to copy over wp-content/uploads to the new Beat. That way, all your old posts will have the images they are supposed to have at the new Beat. The built-in export tool in WordPress doesn’t move images.

  7. This is not a bandwidth issue but a webserver limitation tied to packets and timeouts in mysql admin web interface your probably using.

    IMHO. Your provider is feeding you crap.

    If you have access to the command line.

    Do a database dump from the command line.
    Then download the file via ftp.

    mysqldump -u USER -pPASSWORD DATABASE > filename.sql

    will backup your database in one file.

  8. I see that The Beat on PW was done in WordPress 2.0.2. I did a similar recovery for Michael Davis, whose old site was in WP 2.0.4.

    The plug in you need is called WordPress Database Backup. You can find a copy of it at http://ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup You’ll need FTP access to the folder where your current install exists, and you will have to upgrade your current version of WordPress to 2.0.4, but you can actually do that migration. Old copies can be found at http://wordpress.org/download/release-archive/

    Once it’s installed, you’ll be able to create a backup that you can import into the latest version of WordPress.

    Let me know if you need further help.

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