UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.threads Bug Reports Backup / Restore / Import Truncates at odd characters

Several months ago, I jumped in head first and moved my site from one server to a better one. Being pretty inexperienced, it took me some time, and some help from good people here. Here's the thread: Importing UBB Threads ...to UBB Threads

It was all moved and things looked ok, so I threw the switch and started running on the new site.

THEN I discovered a terrible problem with the Import. I documented it in the last two posts of the "Importing" thread. But it took me several weeks to clean up the problem with some manual editing of hundreds of posts.

I discovered that EVERY odd ascii character caused the imported message to truncate at that character! Here's a list of the characters I found to cause a problem. I am sure many others would too, but these are ones used in posts on my site:
I checked the posts and found that it was ONLY the text in the POST_BODY column was truncated. All other columns in the SQL Insert statement into the ubbt_POSTS table were fully inserted into the new database.

In my "Importing" thread, nobody responded to this problem report, so I thought I'd bring it up again. If anyone copies this post into their forum, and then tries to do a backup followed by a restore or Import of it, I'll bet the post will be truncated at that first ellipsis character above.

And I know there are lots of forums running in European languages, so I am curious how bad this problem is.

Or is there simply a character-set problem between my my laptop (where the import files are) and the new server??? The import files contain the full messages -- that is where I picked up the text of the broken posts.

Hmmm..... 68 views, no comments. I'm worried this one would bite anyone who might need to restore from a backup.

Hi Steve,
I really wish I could help but from my own experience, I've not come across this problem.

I have had to import data three times over the years and each time I used BigDump. It has its own peculiarities but it has worked for me each time.

Can we take it that your problem is now resolved? I guess you just want to resolve this to future-proof your imports?

Perhaps you could try importing with BigDump on a test server?

Driv, have you actually looked at the posts that were imported? If you take my first post above, and copy it into a post on your board, then try a backup / restore, check it after the restore. See if the full text of the post is restored.

I would do this myself, but I am not sure how to test it without backing up and restoring my entire ubbt_POSTS table.

....I suppose with some sql, I could clone the ubbt_posts table definition, and then try a restore into it.


> Can we take it that your problem is now resolved? I guess you just want to resolve this to future-proof your imports?

I spent a lot of hours finding and repairing the posts manually using the online post editing process.