Oh boy, need to get a backup uploaded
 

So, we seem to have found the reason the inlinemod.php process has been occasionally hanging up, the boss says we have one moderator who according to the log, edits, moves, deletes and merges several threads a day. And now it appears one thread is corrupted, it will no longer appear when you look for it.

So, I downloaded a backup, forum.sql, from the back ups folder on the server, with FTP. This thing is nearly 6GB, so it took a while. It's also too big to open with any kind of text editor, so I cannot dig into it and copy the thread and posts that correspond to the topic....

If I could upload it into a test forum, then use phpmyadmin to export just the thread and posts, I could import them into the regular db, right?

Yes, the php has a size limit, I could try Bigdump, but the instructions say to upload big dump and the sql file to the server...that's what I don't understand. Which folder in the directory does the sql file belong?

You can upload it to any folder ... ideally bigdump and sql file in the same folder as bigdump will see the file when you run bigdump script.

Ok, I can try that, thanks

So, upload BD and the Mysql db to a test folder, and run BD and it will sort the single sql file into the tables structure?

Using ssh with Putty would be very much faster than using Bigdump if you have root access.