Easiest Way To Move Servers

[majoreyeswater]

Desperately loking for some help, as I am at the wrong end of a solution.

I have vbulletin 3.5 with a few mods and template changes. I have hosted this out of my own home for a while, but the utilisation and bandwidth now means I want it hosted elsewhere.

It is sat on a windows 2003 server. Surprisingly I set this up, but have never had to maintain it or do anything to it as it has never caused me a problem, and I can't remember/don't have a clue what I am doing.

I have three challenges.

1. Locate the forum database - you might laugh, but I have do idea what I am looking for.

2. How to move the forum DB across

3. How to tell the forum where the new database is as I am likely to stick it in a different directory/folder.

Currently I am sat having engaged a hosting company and still hosting it of my own home as I have no idea what I am doing.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

1. Easy ;)
Open a windows command prompt, switch to a temporary directory that can hold your database backup file, and run mysqldump on the commandline (assuming you have the %PATH% variable set to include your MySQL directory).

2. Transfer (FTP) the create backup file to the new server, and import from the commandline.

3. You don't need to tell 'where' the database is. Database is connected to based on servername/port/databasename. Your MySQL install will control where the actual database will be located on disk.

You can find more indo on this subject here: Appendix 3: Technical Documents (http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/appendix_3)

[majoreyeswater]

thank you, will give that a go. will have to speak to the hosting service to see if they can run the import from the comman line for me.


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So, all was going so well....

I did this..

mysqldump -uUSERNAME -pPASSWORD forum (where forum is the name of my db.. original huh?)

all goes well for a while, lots of characters flashing past my screen, quite a bit of beeping, and then...

mysqldump: Error 2013: Lost connection to MySQL server during query when dumping table `attachment` at row: 4

I wish... I wish... I wish I knew what on earth it meant, but for a moment there I actually felt like I knew what I was doing...

Any more help would be immensley welcomed and I'll speak highly of you forever more...

[majoreyeswater]

After much guidance (which was much appreciated) the database is now backed up.

I was forgetting to direct it into a file, so of course it was simply screen dumping the contents... I never said I was clever...!!!

Anyway, have uploaded it and the host is going to restore it for me (we can't afford a dedicated server and of course the host won't allow command line access to a shared server - which is fair enough and I'd worry if they did)

Let's see how this goes.