Thread:Project:Support desk/Restore a broken wiki/reply

Hi!

What you in fact are doing are a combined server move and upgrade.

If you have the following, you will be able to restore (=move) the wiki: The files from the old wiki. What you must have are the contents of the folders images/. If you use a modified skin (= not one of the default skins), then you will need these files from inside the folder skins/. If you use extensions, you will need these extensions from inside the folder extensions/. Note that MediaWiki 1.22 already does provide some extensions by default; do not overwrite these extensions. Most likely you will have to download newer versions of the other extensions you use; you find them here on mediawiki.org. And you need to copy over the file LocalSettings.php and adjust the database name, user and password and possibly the value of $wgServer.

Now you know, which files from the old installation you need. In a first step I would copy these files of the old wiki into the new installation. Then put the database into the MySQL server. Make sure to keep the DB backup.

After that you will have to run the PHP script maintenance/update.php from the shell. This script will update your database to be compatible with the new MediaWiki version. If this step fails (which I would say is likely) you will still need the backup to restore the DB again.

If all this worked, you should have a working wiki with version 1.22.5.

However, for such a bigger update, expect PHP errors to happen. You will find them in the error log of PHP - solve them before you run your new wiki.