Our situation was a little different. One of our developers ran a mass update on customer data to merge records deemed to be identical. Much later we found out that the sales people were entering housing developments under the same name and only differentiating with a lot distinction in the notes. Suddenly all the housing developments were trimmed down to one record each. This caused a big problem when trying to find notes and plans on a specific house in the development. To make matters worse we didn’t have a way to go back as the problem was discovered literally months later.

We did, however, have a copy of the data files from before the merge took place. So I built a new MySQL install on another server, created a new INNODB schema and table to find where the files were written to, stopped the service, copied the files over as you outlined above, and then edited the my.ini file in the MySQL\bin directory. Note that I don’t use XAMPP so I don’t have a my.cnf file but rather the my.ini file. Very important!

Et voila! Suddenly I have what appears to be a copy of the data that I can now create a script to compare the old and current to find any missing records from the errant merge.

Phew! Thanks for “giving back”

But I could NOT get the MySql database that had all our website articles back. I worked on it for three days until I found this article. 2hrs later the site was 100% restored. Thank you. Thank you SO much.

Thank you.

Thanks for a great resource!
Andrew