Alden Bates' Weblog

As I mentioned last night, I had to restore some database files. Unfortunately the backup I'd downloaded was in a tarred/gzip file with each database table represented by three files with the extensions frm, myd and myi. After googling a bit (dear Google: please don't bother giving me "Supplemental result" listings if the target page is gone and you don't have a cache copy of it. That's just dumb.) I found that these were raw SQL database files.

The only way to restore them is appeared to be to copy them directly to MySQL's data directory - the problem being that I didn't actually have access to the MySQL data directory on the web server in question. You would think, given that phpMyAdmin had given me these files as a backup that it would have an easy way to restore them, but if it does, I couldn't find it.

The solution ended up being:

1. Install MySQL and MySQL Administrator on my home PC.
2. Copy the appropriate table files to the MySQL data directory.
3. Use MySQL Administrator to make a backup in SQL format.
4. Use the SQL script from the backup to restore the table on the web site.

Once the tables were restored, I used a couple of SQL statements to copy the data across to the appropriate table, and all was hunky dory.