Restore a corrupted mediaWiki, to a newer verison of mediaWiki

Question

A working installation of mediawiki was corrupted by a user "touching" all files under the dir structure, ending in all files having the same exact permissions, and modify dates. I'm not sure which of the above had caused the wiki to stop working, but in fact - that's what happened.

The mediaWiki is version 1.26 - currently out of support, so I know.

Every single file of the wiki is available, and the dir' structure is indeed intact. The wiki's DB is not longer available. However the images/media (if indeed stored using the DB), are not as critical to the user as the actual page text content.

Is there a way to save this wiki ? I've looked into restoring mediaWiki, but then it's assumed the wiki has been backed up properly, and this is not our case, unfortunately.

Thank you.

Answer 1

According to MediaWiki's support desk, page content is stored in the database. So, to fully restore the site, you would need to find a copy of the database.

If the database is irretrievable, you could try doing a Google site:example.com search (replace your domain with your MediaWiki URL) to see if Google has at least some of the pages cached. Save them as HTML to build them back up manually.

You can also check the Wayback Machine if they have indexed your site. If they haven't, it's an excellent idea for future sites to have it record a snapshot of all your pages (or at least your most important ones) periodically - that way you have a backup you can refer to.