XF 1.5 Backing up *only* site settings and tweaks?

iaresee

Active member
Hi Xenforo Community!

I'm working on a migration for a forum from VBulletin 4.2 to Xenforo 1.5. I have a test site running and tweaked and have done a migration of the VBulletin data with reasonable success (see here for the one problem I've encountered).

I'd like to save just the site settings at this point, dump everything, start again from scratch with the migration and then restore the site settings (group permissions, template, phrase customizations, overall site search setup, etc.).

I know I can save the entire database to backup the whole site, but if I just wanted the "settings" stuff, what tables would I want to capture? I basically want to exclude:
  • Specific user account information
  • Nodes and posts
  • Conversations
But I would want to include:
  • Tweaks to group permissions
  • Phrase tweaks
  • Node-specific settings
  • Group-specific settings
My thought was I'd re-set the site, run another migration, and then restore the saved tweaks overtop of the migrated content to get back to sanity.

Though, as I'm typing this out I'm beginning to think even without excluding the posts and user accounts and what not this might be the best way to do things. The import of the data should be deterministic from migration run to migration run, right? User A will be User A every time I do a migration? And Post 123 will be Post 123 every time I do a migration?

If that's the case I could save the whole database, reset, migrate, then restore the save and I think what I'd have is the latest VB content plus all my tweaks reapplied, right?

In any case, I'd certainly appreciate any general advice here. I'm logging tweaks but at this point it'd kind of suck to have to go and reapply them manually again. Especially considering I'm probably in for at least one or two more test migrations before we do our final migration and turn off the VB-based site.
 
I would also say that we can't recommend doing any partial restorations or direct database manipulation like that. Normally, if you're doing some tweaking, you might do it before the import and setup the backup before importing.
 
You should have taken the backup before doing any test imports or making any test posts, etc.

This thread explains the process: https://xenforo.com/community/threads/importing-guidelines.25325/

I'm familiar with that post and have taken a pre-migration backup. It is, unfortunately, a touch naive in what it assumes you can pre-configure before doing an import of a very large site. I want to leave my existing VB site running while we work out the kinks in the migration and Xenforo. So the cycle is:
  • Wipe and reinstall xenforo
  • Restore the pre-migration configuration
  • Migrate
  • Do post-migration configuration and clean up (which is considerable)
  • Test
  • Rinse and repeat
We want to minimize the downtime for the forum that our users see so that means leaving the VB forum up and functioning until the migration process is something we can do reasonably quickly and accurately. There are host of things you cannot do before migrating because you don't have the site structure present do them on. Tweaks to the nodes, group settings, administrator and moderator grants, etc. It's fiddly stuff. Stuff that you don't really want to write down and go through time and time again.

This puts a real damper on the migration for sure. I'm not keen to redo all that post-migration tweaking any more than I have to.

I would also say that we can't recommend doing any partial restorations or direct database manipulation like that. Normally, if you're doing some tweaking, you might do it before the import and setup the backup before importing.

Is there a way to a catch-up migration so I can migrate, tweak and then do a partial migration to catch up the state of the two forums?
 
It's the only method available, regardless whether you consider it to be naive.


It's not possible.

You can only do a complete import.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Consider both things feature requests then, I guess. I can think of other circumstance where I'd want to be able to replicate my settings, but not the content, of my site. Consider a test and production forum setup. It'd be nice to be able to test settings in a restricted environment and migrate them to production without having to do it manually.
 
Top Bottom