Good News and Bad News concerning the missing posts

Ok, first the good news - the binary log files which mysql uses to track transactional changes on the database seem to be intact. Theoretically these logs can be played back to restore *everything*

But there's a catch (and here's the bad news) - binary logging restoration is something I've never tried until tonight and I wasn't able to get it to even start due to duplicate entry keys. I need to find the point to start at and this will take time -- a considerable amount of time considering the log files are several times larger than the db itself.

Presuming I can find the correct point to start I can run a restore then, using a process similar to the one used to merge the posts of the ISRP board I can pull posts out of this database and into the restored one.

If this works though it will take time - a considerable amount of time I might add -- according to one website it took a server considerably beefier than ours 9 hours to playback the logs. Also, to be safe during the playback I'll need to shut down any and all external db processes - that means no circvs maximvs, no store, nothing. If I do this ENWorld goes dead to the world except for a pointer page for at least two days.

The reason I'm posting this here instead of the staff forum is I've never done this before and I know there are at least a couple of database techies on this board. I could use some help, cause at this point this little PHP jockey is over his head.

Good luck

I hope you can bring things back. And, as mentioned before, if we need to loose what we've done since then, that's no problem with me. Particularly if you can keep it up in paralell so we can grab stuff.

I am *not* familiar with log restores on mysql. I have done them on DB2 and it worked beautifully. Admittedly, it wasn't a lot of logs; it was a controlled test situation; and the hardware was pretty beefy.

I will check around to see if I can find somebody with some real world experience with mysql that might be able to offer advice.

Good luck Spoony! I really respect your work.

I'm not a database guru, but I'll volunteer my technical skills if you need any help. I have a lot of storage space and some fast hosting if you need data mirrored or anything.

Actually, I just had another idea.

If you'd like, I'd be willing to donate one of my machines to run the logs offline. That is, we could transfer the backup and the logs to the machine, restore the backup, replay the logs, make a new backup, and then restore that new backup onto the ENWorld server. Would save a lot of ENWorld downtime, at least.

Not a bad idea, though transmission between the machines may take a little while (the logs are a whopping 4GB).

Also having the process done externally is safer than doing it on the production machine.

My email is billgates@microsoft.com - except replace billgates with mlmorr0 and replace microsoft.com with uky.edu

Good luck

I'll sacrifice a rubber chicken for the cause (and someday I'll post that story -- the sysadmins around here will get a kick out of it).

I've done similar processes with Exchange and MS SQL Server, never with MySQL, but I'll do some reading at work today and see if I can edumacate myself. So long as a good backup is made beforehand, though, the most you'd risk is a couple days of downtime.

Brilliant!

Spoony, I've done a lot of database work. Is there something I can help take a look at?