Thread:Project:Support desk/Gigabytes of data taken up by MySQL database for mediawiki installation/reply (9)

I'd recommend doing the backup of the entire NS_MAIN and other important namespaces like the Template: and Category: namespace if you're using them, with all revisions and not only the latest one, unless you want to lose the entire history of changes.

Note that although the generated XML may look very big, you can compress it with gzip to reduce the size and download it.

You don't need to uninstall MediaWiki (the files you downloaded from here). Just drop the database, and rename the LocalSettings.php file to something else (LocalSettings.php.old for example) and follow the installation instructions at Manual:Installing MediaWiki, without the need to download and unpack the sources again.

That should create a new empty database. Now you can merge your local customizations in your LocalSettings.php.old to the new LocalSettings.php.

Then you can now import the .xml backup you generated before, as explained in Manual:Importing XML dumps.