Question

I use a WordPress plugin called ‘Shopp’. It stores product images in the database rather than the filesystem as standard, I didn’t think anything of this until now.

I have to move server, and so I made a backup, but restoring the backup is proving a horrible task. I need to restore one table called wp_shopp_assets which is 18MB.

Any advice is hugely appreciated.

Thanks,
Henry.

Answer 1

For large operations like this it is better to go to command line. phpMyAdmin gets tricky when lots of data is involved because there are all sorts of timeouts in PHP that can trip it up.

If you can SSH into both servers, then you can do a sequence like the following:

1. Log in to server1 (your current server) and dump the table to a file using “mysqldump” — mysqldump --add-drop-table -uSQLUSER -pPASSWORD -h
SQLSERVERDOMAIN DBNAME TABLENAME > BACKUPFILE

2. Do a secure copy of that file from server1 to server2 using “scp” —
   scp BACKUPFILE USER@SERVER2DOMAIN:FOLDERNAME

3. Log out of server 1

4. Log into server 2 (your new server) and import that file into the new DB using “mysql” — mysql -uSQLUSER -pPASSWORD DBNAME < BACKUPFILE

You will need to replace the UPPERCASE text with your own info. Just ask in the comments if you don’t know where to find any of these.

It is worthwhile getting to know some of these command line tricks if you will be doing this sort of admin from time to time.