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 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:

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.

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

(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.