philipnet

Over the last few days I have been reposting most of my blogs that were on sms2003.com on to my windowsadvice.com blog. Now whilst the information is still accessible on the old server, I’ve totally lost any ability to manage, organise or amend them.

So I asked Steve (who setup sms2003.com) if he could send me a dump from the database of all my blogs, and he did. In fact he send me an export of the whole database which included everyone’s blogs and all the comments (including the spam!).

The first task was to figure out what on earth I should do with this .bak file I had as an attachment in my email. I recognised the file extension from somewhere, but I couldn’t quite place what it was or what I should do with it. A bit of Googling gave me the right hint – I should try importing it into SQL Server 2000. Ah ha! I had realised where I had seen it before, so I muddled along into Enterprise Manager and tried to restore the database.

Except that it kept failing. It took a bit more Googling and a hunt in the Options tab to work out that I needed to modify the location of where the database was being restored to, in order for the process to work.

Now I had the data in a usable form, I needed to get the pertinent parts out of the database and into a text file. For that, I just exported the contents of the blog_Content table where ever I was the author. That did mean that I didn’t get any of the comments, but then I didn’t particularly feel the need to move them across.

One thing to note, SQL stores the " character as two " characters. So I substituted the two "s for one in the exported text. Then, for almost every entry in the export, I cut and pasted the title and code content into BlogJet, tidied up the formatting, checked the spelling and made the occasional grammatical change before uploading it to windowsadvice.com . Then using the admin console in Community Server I pasted in the date and time the post was originally made.