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:
countersdatasearchtemplates_custom
If you are restoring from an
automatic backup generated by Big Medium, you can find
compressed versions of these directories here (where YYYY.MM.DD-HH.MM.SS
is the date and time when the backup was made):
moxiedata/backups/YYYY.MM.DD-HH.MM.SS/moxiedata-files
Uncompress these files and place them in the moxiedata directory.
(If you're uploading them via FTP, make sure that your FTP client is
set to “plain text” or “ASCII” mode.
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.
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:
Rebuild all pages for each site (“Layout>Rebuild All Pages”).
Open and save the theme style sheet (“Layout>Edit Theme Style Sheet”).
No need to make any changes, just open and save.
Restore the image and document directories
Big Medium stores images, documents and support files in four directories
in each site’s page directory:
bm.assetsbm.docbm.pixbm.theme
(In versions prior to Big Medium 2.0.4, the “assets” and “theme” directories
are instead named bm~assets and bm~theme; for installations that were
installed prior to Big Medium 2.0.4, the “doc” and “pix” directories
are named bm~doc and bm~pix.)
It’s possible that not all of these directories will exist in all of your
sites; if any of them are missing from your page directory, that’s OK.
If you are restoring from an
automatic backup generated by Big Medium, you can find
compressed versions of these directories for each site here (where
YYYY.MM.DD-HH.MM.SS is the date and time when the backup was made):
moxiedata/backups/YYYY.MM.DD-HH.MM.SS/public-files
Inside that directory are directories for each site, named after the
domain name and page directory for the site. For example:
example-com-pagedir
That directory in turn contains compressed versions of the four bm.
directories listed above. Uncompress these files and place them in
site’s page directory. (If you're uploading them via FTP, make sure that
your FTP client is set to “binary” mode.)
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.
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.
