Ah many thanks to all.
As a newby I spent a lot of time familiarizing myself with AMPPS, myPhpAdmin and phpbb Etc.
Ultimately, I got a test system running on local host and dicovered why people and the documentation were talking about unzipping the backup and doing things manually rather than just doing a restore (all of which works more-or-less as expected).
When I originally tried to simply unzip my backup an error was reported - "Unsupported Format". I initially ignored this thinking that the backup was in it's own format. I ignored this because I'd never tried unzipping a backup file from a forum to know that it unzip should work.
I then set up a new forum and restored my backup and gave the right prefix Etc. As mentioned the process completed "Successfully".
I was able to re-create a forum that had the first entry page "Number of users, Posts Etc. But no visible topics Etc.
On investigation I looked at the tables with the correct prefixes and realized that the last ten tables were missing... This included Users Etc.
It is now clear to me that the backup file I have is truncated possibly due to a timeout on the server Etc.
At this stage I'm thinking that without the last ten tables (especially Users) the whole recreation is hopeless despite having the forum topic groups, posts Etc. So close and yet so far... Even being able to recreate the threads and see the posts whould have been useful even if the user was unknown.
Does everyone agree that the task is hopeless?
As a newby I spent a lot of time familiarizing myself with AMPPS, myPhpAdmin and phpbb Etc.
Ultimately, I got a test system running on local host and dicovered why people and the documentation were talking about unzipping the backup and doing things manually rather than just doing a restore (all of which works more-or-less as expected).
When I originally tried to simply unzip my backup an error was reported - "Unsupported Format". I initially ignored this thinking that the backup was in it's own format. I ignored this because I'd never tried unzipping a backup file from a forum to know that it unzip should work.
I then set up a new forum and restored my backup and gave the right prefix Etc. As mentioned the process completed "Successfully".
I was able to re-create a forum that had the first entry page "Number of users, Posts Etc. But no visible topics Etc.
On investigation I looked at the tables with the correct prefixes and realized that the last ten tables were missing... This included Users Etc.
It is now clear to me that the backup file I have is truncated possibly due to a timeout on the server Etc.
At this stage I'm thinking that without the last ten tables (especially Users) the whole recreation is hopeless despite having the forum topic groups, posts Etc. So close and yet so far... Even being able to recreate the threads and see the posts whould have been useful even if the user was unknown.
Does everyone agree that the task is hopeless?
Statistics: Posted by jwm_oz — Tue Jun 10, 2025 4:20 am