Hi there, i spent over six months creating a very intricate survey to help families tell their story to a senate inquiry about treatment of children in foster care. I backed up regularly - using the button that has the backup on it - in sql. Nothing there mentioned anything about having to export a survey structure.

After moving servers and trying to upload the backups i have discovered it needs to be a lss file - which i obviously dont have becuase i just pressed the backup button. :ohmy:

i have viewed all lime dumps and system backups and there is no such lss file, so my question is how do i get my survey working again - there were over 150 fully completed submissions, with ANOTHER thousand partially completed ones.

this survey created evidence we needed to prove to the senate and australian government that there are many crimes being committed under the guise of child protection. I DESPERATELY need some assistance on how i can retrieve all this data - and then duplicate this and reopen the duplicate to worldwide participants so we can file evidence with the united nations for gross breaches of human rights. this is appearing to be hte only way we MAY get some recognition of the corruption and possibly a remedy forced by Geneva.

any assistance AT ALL would be so greatly appreciated.

i run the website Alecomm.com - it is a support service for the many thousands of families destroyed by corrupt child protection practises, and other areas of interest still being government corurption, protection of the elderly and disabled and other ethical and moral issues.

i would truly love to hear from somebody that could give me some direction and or assistance and would be eternally grateful.

kind regrds,
marney

Hi Marney...
If you have .sql (dump) files, you have basically NO problem because you backuped the entire database... and you will be able to reimport all data in your new platform. As LimeSurvey have no feature to reimport a dump file, you have to achieve this via the phpmyadmin (or similar) interface.

The following process will restore your previous database: I assume that you want to recreate 100% of your previous installation, not only reimport this specific survey with related submitted responses. (If not you have to change somehow this method, for example if you have change admin/users credentials in your new platform and don't want to overwrite this with data of your old platform)...

As shown on the screenshot (sure you will also find some tutorials on Youtube):
1) select the database (left sidebar)
2) open SQL tab and paste the content of your .sql file
3) Click [Go] to run your (big) query

Remember that your 2 installations have to use same Limesurvey version (not 1.90 one and the other 2.06 ). If you need to update, just install the same LS version, import your db, and update when 100% ok...



About LS export files:
.sql: Full database (including general conf, users, surveys, responses, etc.)
.lss: Survey structure; No responses (= desactivated survey)
.lsa: Activated survey; Includes responses. Only aavilable for recent LS versions

Hi Benoit.

I need your further advice for the restore dump_sql backup. Please help.

By phpmyadmin, I have managed to import that dump_sql into the exactly database name (as well the LS version, empty - no survey yet, in another server).
But I can't see any of the imported survey (from dump_sql) in the Survey List. Totally empty.

Any advice?

Thanks
Iwan

Hi Iwan,
No idea... except a prefix related issue where the fresh install is using default "lime_" prefix and your old one "somecustom_" prefix (in this case all tables are in the same db).

Check the value of $prefix in your config.php file, edit if needed and remove unnecessary tables.