Problem with character encoding after restore

  • mkj2

    (@mkj2)


    8 years, 7 months ago

    Hallo,

    yesterday, we needed for the first time a backup due to a severe hardware problem on the server. Well, things did not go smoothly. I donwloaded the DB tar.gz file from my Dropbox account to my workstation.

    1. Upload of the sql file via a client (HeidiSQL): The character encoding was wrong, and the restore did not work at all. This is a common problem after dowloading from a linux system to windows and back to linux.

    2. Upload of the ZIP file via phpmyadmin: out-of-memory-error. We have 256 MB PHP RAM, but that was not enough.

    3. Upload of the ZIP file via adminer: out-of-memory-error.

    4. I uploaded the tar.gz file to the server and extracted it there. Then I restored the database via the SSH console (Putty). Bingo! That worked like a charm. No timeouts and no problems with character encoding.

    Eventually, everything worked out really well. But this was far from a one-click-restore and far beyond what the average WP user could do.

    The lesson: always test your backups under real-life conditions. Never rely on theory!

    Any ideas on how to improve my workflow?

    • This topic was modified 8 years, 7 months ago by mkj2.
Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • Andreas W.

    (@aweissinpsyde)

    8 years, 7 months ago

    Hello @mkj2

    thank you for sharing your experience. How big is your DB and what are your PHP timeout server settings?

    In the future we will publish a restore plugin so BackWPup user can easily restore their backups in few steps via wordpress interface. Right now users need to upload FTP files and DB by hand.

    • This reply was modified 8 years, 7 months ago by Andreas W..
    Thread Starter mkj2

    (@mkj2)

    8 years, 7 months ago

    Hello,

    it’s a 110 MB database. The PHP timeout is set to 300 sec, I think. It’s not a timeout problem. It’s PHP RAM related, as far as I understand. Since it is shared hosting we can’t increase the limits further. The more severe problem is character encoding. It’s a common problem. Sometimes it happens, sometimes not. I’ve never really understood how I could prevent this. German umlauts suck!

    Andreas W.

    (@aweissinpsyde)

    8 years, 7 months ago

    Hi MKJ2,

    What is you maximum script execution time under BackWPup > Setting > Jobs? Here we recommend to set it to 25 seconds.

    Thread Starter mkj2

    (@mkj2)

    8 years, 7 months ago

    I usually don’t change the default setting of 0. Don’t get me wrong: The plugin works fine. (Well, it sometimes does not delete old archives in the Dropbox account, but that’s another story.) The phpmyadmin memory error has nothing to do with BackWPup. The character encoding problem can probably be avoided by uploading the zipped file. I just wondered if I missed anything on the BackWPup settings page.

    Andreas W.

    (@aweissinpsyde)

    8 years, 7 months ago

    I’m using german language too but I never had any problems about restoring with uploading using phpmyadmin. I uploaded bigger files as you and all was working fine. I’m using 512Mb only. Apache and Nginx no problem.

    My testserver:
    nginx/1.10.3
    Database client version: libmysql – mysqlnd 5.0.12-dev
    PHP version: 7.0.22-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
    Server version: 5.7.19-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
    PHPmyAdmin: 4.5.4.1deb2ubuntu2

    Thread Starter mkj2

    (@mkj2)

    8 years, 7 months ago

    I’m sure, it’s not BackWPup-related. Do you upload the zipped SQL file?

    Andreas W.

    (@aweissinpsyde)

    8 years, 7 months ago

    It seems to be a server issue. I tried zip and .sql only. There was no problem.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

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