Mysql Disaster Recovery

[MRGRIM]

Hi Guys,

I need to pick your brains. Around 10 months ago my rack server in the attic died and I was unable to recover the it and I had no backups (it’s a home server and I’d never really gotten around to back stuff up).

Rather than replace the hardware like for like (i.e. buy another HP DL130) I decided to start from a fresh and went down the XenServer route and virtualised my server(‘s).

I had a number of web projects (old university projects and some old forums etc) running on the older server and recently I wanted to resurrect some of the MySQL databases. Has anyone ever had to do this or done anything similar that they may be able to shine some light on for me?

So far I’ve not found a lot on the web about doing this (sadly most documents say the most important thing about disaster recovery is to have a backup / mysqldump) However I did find an article which said it would be as simple as moving the “data” folder from the old server to the new one. I tried this and I thought it was working, I login to the MySQL workbench and I can see 90% of the tables, and half of my web application works e.g. I can login, but when I go to view user.messages it tells me the table doesn’t exist. When I view user.messages under the workbench it shows me the table is there but when I query on it, it also tells me it doesn’t exist.

Have I missed something?

[Infiltrator]

Can you see the tables when you issue the following command

MySQL>Show tables;

Edited June 14, 2010 by Infiltrator

[MRGRIM]

Will check that out in a moment, I just realised when I copied the data folder, I actually only copied the database folders I required from within it, so I'm setting up a temp MySQL server and copying the whole data folder over it, I'm then hoping it will start the SQL services and hopefully allow me to do a mysqldump.

Will post any solution here.

[MRGRIM]

Ok, I installed XAMPP on a PC, moved all the data folder across, then had to edit the logfile size in my.ini under the MySQL bin folder. Fired up phpMyAdmin and from there I was able to do an export on my data.

Thanks for the help but it looks like its been resolved. :)

[Infiltrator]

No problems!

[digip]

Ok, I installed XAMPP on a PC, moved all the data folder across, then had to edit the logfile size in my.ini under the MySQL bin folder. Fired up phpMyAdmin and from there I was able to do an export on my data.

Thanks for the help but it looks like its been resolved. :)

I know you have this fixed and I see you did an export from the PC, but couldnt you have just done an import on the other machine of the exisiting data and just point to where the files reside? I dont know much abotu databases, but Im curious how difficult it would be to recover one if the file itself is still in tact.