Global Moxie

Question

How do I restore a Big Medium installation from backup?

Answer

First, of course, you need to have a backup. These instructions assume that either your hosting provider has a backup of your data, or you previously made your own backup of your Big Medium data.

Reinstalling the application?

If you need to restore your entire Big Medium installation, including the Big Medium application itself, you should first do a fresh installation of Big Medium, following the installation instructions through the second step of the setup wizard. When you’re prompted to create your first administrator account, you can stop and continue with the data restoration described below:

Restore the four data directories

Four directories in the moxiedata directory hold all of Big Medium’s data:

• counters
• data
• search
• templates_custom

If your hosting company has the backup, ask the tech support team to restore those four directories (and all of their contents) and place them in the moxiedata directory.

Or, if you have an offline backup of the four directories, upload them to the moxiedata directory via FTP, making sure that your FTP client is set to “plain text” or “ASCII” mode.

Set your FTP client to “binary” or “automatic” mode.

If you are restoring the files via FTP, all of the remaining uploads will be in binary/automatic mode.

Copy your theme backup files

If you have saved any custom themes to the theme library, there will be a directory located here:
moxiedata/templates_custom/theme_backup

If no such directory exists, skip to the next step. Otherwise, copy all of the directories inside that directory to this location on the server (you may need to create the _custom directory): bmadmin/themes/_custom

Rebuild pages and style sheets

After restoring the data directories, sign into each site in Big Medium and follow these steps:

1. Rebuild all pages for each site (“Layout>Rebuild All Pages”).

2. Open and save the theme style sheet (“Layout>Edit Theme Style Sheet”). No need to make any changes, just open and save.

After following these steps for all sites, they all should be back to normal, except for any uploaded images and documents.

Restore the image and document directories

Big Medium stores images, documents and support files in four directories in each site’s page directory:

• bm~assets
• bm~doc
• bm~pix
• bm~theme

Note: Some of these directories may not exist in all sites, and that’s OK.

If your hosting company has the backup, ask the tech support team to restore those directories (and all of their contents) into each site’s page directory.

Or, if you have an offline backup of these directories, upload each site’s directories into its respective page directory via FTP, making sure that your FTP client is set to “binary” mode.