I had a very old computer (running FC3), hosting some very old wordpress blogs that got broken into. The good news is that I had backups of all the blogs. But since the computer was still working, though not allowed to be online, I could also copy the data directly from that computer. I ended up copying data from both places to get the blogs back up. Here’s what I did.

  1. Register a cname for the old computer name with a new computer.
  2. Set up a virtual host for this cname, using the same directory structure as on the old computer.
    If I were starting over, I’d probably use a different scheme, but I don’t want to break any links that other people have to us. So things will stay the same.
  3. Download the latest version of WordPress and make a copy for each blog.
  4. Edit the wp-config.php file with the info from the old blogs.
  5. Create a mysql database and grant the privileges for the correct user.
mysql> create database alpha1;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> grant all privileges on alpha1.* to alpha_user@localhost identified by 'amazing_password';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> quit
  1. Load the old sql dump into this new database.
$ mysql -u alpha_user -p alpha1 < 2014-11-18-alpha1.sql

I got the sql file from doing a mysqldump, which I use for backups.

  1. Copy the old uploads directory from backup to the new wordpress location and make sure everything is owned by apache:apache.

I had another problem that I needed to address with these blogs. They all used https for access. On the computer I moved them to, https was already being used by another website I was running. Since most of these blogs are no longer being updated, just read, I decided to not use https for anything. This did require that I temporarily set up https for the blogs. Then I logged in, upgraded the database, edited the settings to use http instead of https. Lastly, I installed a plugin called search and replace. I used this to change the links for all the uploads from starting with https to http.

That’s it.