I had something really go wrong with the board and I still don't know what. For some reason, the board became unaccessable. When you went to it you just got a generic windows server error page. I was able to see that the index file and settings files were fine and only managed to localize it to something somewhere in the themes folder. I'd suspect it was in the default folder since that's where most of the action is at.
OK, so I clean installed SMF 1.05 and added TP and the themes and then restored the sql backup I had and most of the board is back to where it was. I have a few odd issues that aren't related to TP to work out but I was wondering where the block info is stored for TP. I lost all of the articles and block settings I had and wonder if there is an easy way to restore them without mantually rebuilding it all.
I'll probably ask this over at the SM.org forums but I wonder if you all off hand know how to restore attachments as well. I still have the old attachment folder but when I put it in the new attachment folder, only the personal avatars are recognized. Everything is pointing to the right folders as far as the admin panel is concerned that I can see so I'm lost how to get the pics back. I'm sure its one of the php files someplace but I don't have a year to look for them lol.
I still have a complete copy of all of the files on the crashed version that I can use for recovery of these systems.
BTW, when I rebuilt the server I ended up with the default build-in article, however on the article editor area there is no trace of it. Under main it shows one article but when you click, you don't see one shown at the bottom. Now I'm stuck with a hello message I can't seem to dump lol.
Thanks for any help guys.
The article contents and block settings etc are also stored in your database, installing SMF/TP may overwrite them so as long as the versions of SMF and TP are the same as previous, if you now restore your database backup over the TP install I would have thought TP will find them again.
A bit late for you now possibly, but a way to keep hard copy of articles, is copy the contents of the article, paste it into notepad and save it as a text file or create an empty html file, paste it in between the body tags (this is how I edit articles) and save it as an htm(l) file.
If you did a backup of your database via the admin panel of your SMF board, that does not backup the TP tables of the database. You'll need to use a program like phpmyadmin to do that.
if you want to delete that one article (and have the tp tables) go into tp_articles in phpmyadmin and delete the entry for that article in tp_articles.
Ok, ghost article was removed and I guess from now on I'll have to do a weekly backup in phpmyadmin to make sure I have TP's stuff saved.
Anyone have any idea what file points the forum to the attachments in the attachment folder?
I find it odd that all of the personal avatars that are saved there were recognized but not any encoded pictures from the forum. Yes, the avatars are saved as graphics and the attachments are saved as binary files and that is the difference but how to I get SMF to see those binary files?
Bloc has enabled peeps to use custom TP table prefixes. This means that you can name the TP tables with the same prefix as the rest of your SMF install and back everything up together.
I am thinking to have smf prefix automatically added to new installations from now on. It simply will make life easier when it follows the smf prefix, both in backup and multiple TP installations.Upgrades i will prob. leave alone though.
Thanks guys, I found the problem with the attachments. For some reason when I did a backup restore the attachments field was not restored. I created a dummy site and managed to get the backup to work on it (no tp or anything else on it) and did an export/import into the running site and all is well now.
Yes, having the normal forum backup also back up all of the TP fields would be nice, but for now I know that to quickly restore future errors I need to:
Do daily backups within the forum
Do at least a weekly backup from myphpadmin
Backup the attachments folder a few times a week
doing those three things will ensure a fairly easy restore no matter what happens on my host.
Ah the lessons we learn eh?
yeah. Indeed. :)