Importing posts only??

[SwissGuy]

Our 3.6.5 board was hacked. They made a real mess so we are going back to a backup from the beginning of April. What we'd like to do is to import the backup from April and then ONLY import the new posts and threads from the hacked board to avoid losing a month's posts.

Is this possible? And, if so, how?

Thanks.

[Steve Machol]

I seriously doubt this will be successful because the post table shares data with many other tables and you will likely see a number of database errors. Unfortunately I do not know of any easy way to do what you want.

One possibility is that you could install a new copy of vB to a new database, then use Impex to import the old data to the new one. Please read the online Impex import instructions here:

http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/impex

Also please view the 'After the Import' instructions here:

http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/impex_cleanup

Note: This *will* change all your existing user, post, thread and forum ID numbers.

[SwissGuy]

I'd just like to post a public post of gratitue to Steve for his help since our forum was hacked -- not only here but also on the support ticket. Thanks very much, Steve.

I have managed to find a way to achieve what I wanted and thought this might be of use for others. This is what I did:

• Created a new database
• Restored the backup from April to the new database
• Emptied the tables "post" and "thread" in the new database
• Exported the tables "post" and "thread" from the hacked database via phpMyAdmin
• Imported the tables "post" and "thread" to the new database via phpMyAdmin
• Updated counters, rebuilt threads, rebuilt search index
• I also did the empty, export, import for the 3 PM tables

Our forum (still in test mode) seems to work perfectly again. The only issues left:

• PM counters are wrong (updates to the right value, though, as soon as anything is done (send, receive, delete)
• Newly registered users since the backup are no longer registered. However, their posts retain their original poster username. This means that the new users (40 in our case) need to reregister and then I can reassociate their original posts back to them using

  UPDATE post SET userid = X WHERE username = 'Y';

  where X is the user Id of the newly registered user and Y is the username associated with posts in question. (Found this fix here on the forum ... thanks for those who posted the original)

So, after a little more testing, we're going live again.