Site off line after changing the Public file system path ("sites/default/files" )

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ram.himal's picture

Hi

Am a new user of drupal and had just got working on a site, setup by a friend. The site runs , based on drupal 7 and hosted on Hostmonster.

Am also new to the forum so am not sure how much specific detail needs to be given or what all is required so would appreciate any advice on this.

Our site is one of 3 hosted via the same hostmonster account

The site is accessed and administered through a web browser with the user logged on and making the changes while connected to the internet.

It was quite exciting to work at customizing our site - so work was on at two fronts -(on the module front it was almost like a kid in a large toy shop - with every conceivable functionality available at a touch module)

  1. Adding modules and enhancing site functionality and other administrative tweaks

  2. Adding content and desiging each page - adding metadata etc

For about a week (last week of feb 2012) we added data / content and tweaked the inferface and the looks - the site was looking good - simple clean and working well. The site has been online for about a year with minimal data on it but after the efforts of the last few weeks it was getting to where we wanted it too.

At some point during the process of refining site functionality, and trying to use the brilliant galleries module we needed to lay a path to some image galleries and might have misread some instructions and ending up going to :

Configuation -> File System and in the
Public file system path
The following change was made "sites/default/files" to "/home2/hm_user_foo/public_html/site_name_foo/Images/Galleries"

after saving this configuration the site just went off - all we get is a blank - no error message - just the name of the website in the address bar and a blank white nothing.

Our site is one of 3 hosted through the same hostmonster account - the other two are working properly, and only the one in which we (I ) fiddled with the Public File path system , has gone offline.

I am able to access the entire filesystem through hostmonster but cannot figure out how to get the site back online

**
We mailed support at Host Monster and till date they have not been able to figure out how to get the site back online.

Below was their advice / reply

Hostmonster Support "Make the path in the file relative to its location in Drupal. If the config file is in /home2/hm_user_foo/public_html/ folder, then you don't need that section of the reference. You would just need to add site_name_foo/Images/Galleries. Please be aware the folder structure is case sensitive, so Image/Galleries will only work if those folders are actually capitalized."

Hostmonster Support: "The domain name is assigned to the public_html/site_name_foo folder on your account, but I don't see that this folder exists, which is why it is not displaying. Let us know how you wish to proceed."

Our reply -

"Hi Support, The folder public_html/site_name_foo does seem to exist, what has happened is one of our contributing developers tried to change the default path to images/galleries (public_html/site_name_foo/Images/galleries) instead of leaving it at the default. "

So a couple of questions

  1. How do we get this site back online - preferably as it was (see backup details below)

  2. Some data that was on the website is based on images and files uploaded - these are all there and accessible via hostmonster but data that was typed in through the web drupal interface- this cannot be seen ? so where would this be and is there a way of saving it. ??

  3. Since i was new drupal we had not taken a backup (or put in place a system) however hostmonster says they run daily, weekly and monthly backups -
    The weekly and monthly backup are automatic and coincidentally happened before we added the bulk of our content and the latest daily backup happened after the mess up. So am not sure these backups would help - Again advice will be appreciated.

I posted this here http://drupal.org/node/1481836 so replies there can also be tracked

regards
ram