Thread

I just got forced off a host because an email account was hacked and sent thousands of spam over the weekend before we figured it out and stopped it.

The old host shut everything off for our site when they discovered the issue made a single backup file with the name host.sql.gz

I don’t know how to open the file or if it is enough for me to bring up the website with all the information from it.  If it is not enough, then I am in deep.  I don’t have any other EE files other than this file, the images I used on the website, and the EE installation package which I stored locally.  The entire set of files from the FTP are gone.

Can I restore the website from this?  Or am I in big trouble?

If their backup doesn’t include all the files besides the database (which it sounds like that file is) then…possible big trouble unfortunately. 

How many images/files did the site have apart from what you have locally?

Do they have no other backups?

They used Cpanel to make the one big backup (the file is 500MB) and then deleted everything.  So I don’t think anything is left.

It was a church website so all the files in the root directory were images and audio files (the audio files are stored locally at the church).  It didn’t have any static pages other than the files used for EE.  I built everything on EE using your tutorial for building a church website.  It was built with version 1.6.9 Core version while that was still free.  I still have that zipped file to install it again, if thats allowed.

~Ryan

I think you should be fine license-wise there, but you don’t want to go through the install process again as that will just create a new site.

Ideally you can restore the EE filesystem as it was, and then create a new/blank database and get the data out of the sql file they gave you.

I’ve used http://www.ozerov.de/bigdump/ with good results for repopulating a database with EE.

Have you tried using some zip software to unzip that file and see what’s actually in it?  Sounds big for just a database file.

Thank you.  I didn’t even think about the file being a compressed file.  I got a freeware compression tool and was able to open up the file which is everything I could have hoped to have and more.

Now that I know I have what I need to reinstall, could you please point me to the latest documentation for restoring the EE filesystem on a new host?

Thanks.

Sure…

http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/130555/

That’s an FAQ topic. Does that help?

(Thanks for the assist, Mike!)