Will a new install pick up an old one.

[DenisG]

Hi everyone.

A couple of years ago I had a personal website, the gallery of which was Coppermine. With being on the pension and the website host cost being a little on the high side I decided to drop the site itself and just keep the site name as an email site only. Recently a family member has offered to pay the site hosting for me so I am looking at restoring and improving it but not by much.

When taking it to email only the host removed the main access files but I notice that the old mysql database for my previous Coppermine gallery remains. Would it be possible if I install the new latest version of Cmine that it will pick up the old db and save me may hours of uploading or is there a workaround to make this happen. Part of the database looks as per the attached.

Many thanks.

Denis.

[phill104]

It is difficult as there is a need for the structure of the albums folder. Do you have any old backups of your old install? If you do then it will make life a lot easier. Might even be worth digging into your cPanel to see if there is an old backup lying around. Some hosts never purge those.

If you have backups of the albums folder then using the database it is quite a simple task to restore. Without it becomes a lot of manual work to restore assuming you do have copies of all the images.

How big was your gallery?

P.S. I do a lot of wildlife photography including butterflies and fungus so am intrigued by some of the descriptions in that screen shot.

[DenisG]

Hi Phil, we have spoken before regarding my old site so nice to see you're still around.

I will have a look around for a backup but at 71 I just can't remember where I filed it when I downgraded. The site itself was built with Serif Webplus which is another headache as it is now discontinued but seems to work perfectly so I,m not sure as to continue with existing or to start from scratch with Xara which I also have. Let me check all my hard drives, old computer, memory sticks etc. and I will get back to you. What I can remember is Cmine was quite heavily customised with help from yourself and Andre. I know when I had the site originally I had to upgrade to the next hosting level for 2gb instead of the 1gb due mainly to the size of the gallery which took the whole thing to 1.2gb. The remaining db suprised me though as it says on the cpanel that it is 9mb which I find hard to believe.

Could I just ask, my host offers Cmine as an install but it is v1.6x and I don't see much on the home page here regarding this version where it just says upgrade to 1.5.48 which I have downloaded. Which should I be using now?

Denis.

[phill104]

1.6.x is the current recommended version. If you find the backup then drop me a line and I can help you with restoring.

[DenisG]

Hi Phil and thanks for the help. Just to update you, after much searching convinced that I had done a backup onto my home computer I just gave up and used 1.6x which was on offer from my site host and they put it on the site for me. It was heart wrenching as my previous version and set up held many thousands of photo's, mainly wildlife. I am now uploading the photo's again from scratch and it is a real pita to do all this again. I have also kept the default Cmine with no mods at all which is nothing like my old one and lots of, to me, things which I loved. Not having my "Recent uploads" as a sort of album is one item I really miss. (You would have to check my Cmine history to see what I mean). The site is back up and thanks again for your assistance. It's at http://www.denisg.co.uk/gallery/ if you want to take a look but note that there are only about 10% of the previous fungi shots for you to browse.

To everyone, backup your entire site to somewhere safe, OFTEN.

[phill104]

Well done on what you have so far. You have a collection of images there, just the sorts of subjects I tend to photograph. As you say, it is important to take backups of at the albums folder and your database. With those you can restore your site should the worst happen.