Is it okay post questions in GDO so that we don't have to wait for next month's Lightning round? If so, I'm not sure if this is the right place. If it isn't, please reply telling me the correct place. I'm going to assume that questions are okay. (Given the truly basic level of my questions at this point, I'd rather limit my questions to a small, friendly audience). If not, just ignore/delete/whatever.
For the benefit of people who were not at last night's Central San Diego meeting, I'm very new to Drupal (a newbie in the truest sense of the word) and asked about creating a 2nd local site so that I could create a local mirror of my live site (to experiment with modules, views, etc.)
The process Christoph described last night to create a second site worked like a charm. Thank you! The one catch was that I got a compatibility error when trying to directly import the mysql file generated from Backup_and_Migrate. "No problem. I'll create a new site and restore into the new site, since that's what I'll be doing from this point on, anyway." The problem importing the mySQL file was a foreshadowing of problems to come.
The restore process worked fine but, uh, no changes in the site and the log file didn't indicate any errors. Then I tried a different mySQL file generated from the live database. 1086 records processed without any errors but they had no effect. So, I backed up my local 1st site (that I use for my training courses) and restored it into the new 2nd site. No problem - changes appeared.
So, I'm suspicious that I may have bad backup files for my live site but I don't see parameters that I can blame. Another symptom is that the mySQL file is 6 MB large. I assume that's large because the maximum size that Backup-and-Migrate will accept is 8 MB and I just started adding data so it's hard to believe that I'm already approaching the max. The mysql.gz files are about 400KB.
Does anyone have any ideas?
And, is there a taboo about unabashedly asking for free technical help here?
Thanks.
Debbie
Comments
Module Files
Hey Debbie, yes this is the most appropriate place to be posting support questions like this. A few things to note...
Files vs Database
It sounds like you've imported your database appropriately, but you're likely getting compatibility errors because your files in the target site don't match the files in the source site(I'm guessing). The database has a lot of configuration settings in there about which modules are on and how those modules are being used, including the path the modules are stored at, so if you don't have the same set of modules/themes/files in the same relative locations, you'll probably get a whole bunch of errors. The best way to do this is to drop an exact copy of the files into the new directory you created for your new site before running the database import via backup and migrate. You could probably do it after the import if it's easier, but ultimately, the files need to match the database.
As for the 8MB limit on file uploads, that's a default specified in your php.ini configuration file, most people bump this way up to 100mb or more as needed, there aren't any major repercussions to increasing this number, and large databases can be ten or hundreds of megabytes.
Backups
We finally did get this working. Apparently, I was doing multiple things wrong. One lesson is not to import from the Acquia wizard. Instead, create a blank database and import using Backup & Migrate. That was just one of my mistakes. Anyway, we now have multiple sites on my local system, one of which is a mirror of the live site.
My current focus is theming and I really wish I could attend the Solano Beach meetings since, apparently, that's a topic they're discussing. But, alas, I have to work late Thursday nights.