Restoring Deleted, Lost, or Corrupted Data

Recovering from a Lost Database
Using Export/Import to Fix a Corrupted Database
Recovering Deleted Folders or Discussions
Recovering Deleted Messages
Troubleshooting
Resources

Recovering from a Lost Database

In the event of database loss, it's possible to recover using your webxdb.1 and webxroll.1 files. See Backup Information for more detail on webxdb.1 and webxroll.1 files.

This is how:

If you need to edit the Web Crossingroll file, you can do it with a text editor. It's just an ASCII text file. You can also combine two or more Web Crossingroll files if necessary. You will need a text editor which allows you to work with very large (several megabyte) files. Simply add the contents of the more recent roll-forward logs in order (from oldest to newest) at the bottom of the oldest roll-forward log.

Rename the file webxroll.1. Name the matching database backup file webxdb.1 and place both in the webx system directory. Proceed as you would to recover a lost database.

Note: If some isolated event occurred which corrupted the database, you can edit the webxroll.1 file to remove that last event, more or rename your webx.db file, and then have Web Crossing recreate the database.

Using Export/Import to Fix a Corrupted Database

If you suspect your active database and backup databases are corrupted, and are using Web Crossing 3.1 or higher, you can use an Export/Import procedure to fix the corruption.

This is how:

  1. Go to the Control Panel > Export > Export entire site
  2. Take note of the name of the file that's created, and leave it in your webx system directory
  3. Stop Web Crossing
  4. Rename or move the following files:
  5. Start Web Crossing, access it, and answer the initial setup questions. It's important to install a certificate at this point, or you won't be able to import your whole database if you're running something other than a Bronze version.
  6. Log on as sysop and delete the Guided Tour. This is important so unique ID numbers can be preserved within your import file.
  7. Go to Control Panel > Memory usage and give Web Crossing at least as much memory as the old database was using.
  8. Import the file from step 2. This can take minutes > hours to process, depending on how big your database is.
  9. When it's completed, your database should be repaired.

Recovering Deleted Folders or Discussions

If you have something in the deleted file in your webx system directory, you can recover it and put it back in the live areas.

  1. Retrieve the file deleted from the webx system directory on the server.
  2. Open deleted with a text editor. If deleted hasn't been discarded for a long time, it may be very large and many text editors won't be able to handle it. One that will is "Ultra Edit," a shareware editor for Windows that can handle huge files. For Mac, try "BBEdit" or "PageSpinner."
  3. Find and copy the relevant folder or discussion in the file. The file is in Web Crossing's SGML export format, which will look familiar to anyone experienced with HTML. If the file was exported with Web Crossing 3.1 or up, a folder will be enclosed within "folder" tags, so copy everything from the leading "<folder ..." down to "</folder>". To recover a discussion the procedure is the same but discussions are bounded by "<discussion..." and "</discussion>" tags. For versions previous to 3.1, the terminology used is <topic> for a folder and <conversation> for a discussion. (You can still import tags using the old terminology into a new version of Web Crossing and it will work fine.)
  4. Save what you copied as a new text file, and put it back on the server in the webx system directory.
  5. Import the saved file.
  6. Note that if any discussions, folders, etc. have been created between the time your recovered item was deleted and the time you re-import it, the uniqueID numbers of the imported discussions and folders will be different - thus any internal bookmarks using uniqueIDs will not work.

In older versions, tags are labeled "topic" and "conversation" because early versions of Web Crossing called folders "topics" and discussions "conversations."

Recovering individual deleted messages

Individual deleted messages are not saved in the deleted file on the server. However, you can recover individual messages by exporting the entire discussion in which they appeared.

  1. Open the export file in a text editor and do a search for the word "deleted." Deleted messages will begin with a string that looks something like this:

    <MESSAGE DELETED AUTHOR=01F6E202 DATE=07/12/1999.11:32:22...

  2. Take out the word "deleted" in the message or messages you want to recover.
  3. Save the file and put it back in the webx system directory with a unique file name.
  4. Then delete the entire discussion and and reimport your edited version, and the deleted message(s) will reappear.

Troubleshooting

I've been waiting a while, and I don't know if it's working right, re-rolling the database.

How can I find out if the import went OK?

Resources

Sysop Documentation

Sysop Control Panel

Web Crossing FAQ