Upgrade Akeeba Backup to Restore Backups of YourSites

There is a bug in Akeeba Backup (prior to version 6.6.0) which cause the restoration of a backup of your YourSites server to fail. The Akeeba developers very quickly resolved the issue after we raised a ticket. All users of Akeeba Backup are advised to upgrade to the latest version. This bug only affects backups of the YourSites server and does not affect backups of client sites in any way.

If you need to restore a backup created prior to version 6.6.0 then you will need to undertake a special process to allow the database data to be restored.

1. Start restoration process but STOP when you get to the database restore step
2. Use FTP and a file editor to examine the files in installation/sql/ called sites.s[i]nn[/i] in these are the table creation and insertion queries
3. Find text that includes the text
   
   "GENERATED ALWAYS"
   
   It should appear in at most 2 files. For example

   `extnauthorurl` varchar(200) GENERATED ALWAYS AS (if(length(`manifest_cache`),ifnull(json_unquote(json_extract(`manifest_cache`,'$.authorUrl')),''),'')) VIRTUAL,
   

   
   You will need to edit each of these to remove the GENERATED ALWAYS ... VIRTUAL part. e.g.

   `extnauthorurl` varchar(200) GENERATED ALWAYS AS (if(length(`manifest_cache`),ifnull(json_unquote(json_extract(`manifest_cache`,'$.authorUrl')),''),'')) VIRTUAL,
   

   becomes

   `extnauthorurl` varchar(200),
   

   This should affect the declaration of up to 6 fields
   
   #__ysts_sites -> certinfo, cachesize, dbsize, tmpsize
   #__ysts_extensions -> extnauthor, extnauthorurl
   
   This will allow the restoration to complete.
   
4. You now need to make sure you are using YourSites version 1.7.4 (or later). Upgrade now if you haven't already.
5. We now need to allow YourSites to restore the table columns we broke in step 3 in order to restore the backup. We do this by removing them from the database using the following SQL commands - YourSites will automatically recreate them
   
   

   
   alter table #__ysts_sites drop column certinfo;
   alter table #__ysts_sites drop column cachesize;
   alter table #__ysts_sites drop column dbsize;
   alter table #__ysts_sites drop column tmpsize;
   
   alter table #__ysts_extensions drop column extnauthor;
   alter table #__ysts_extensions drop column extnauthorurl;
   

6. Go to YourSites in the backend - first time you load may take a couple of minutes for the data to repopuplate.

Last Updated: 02 August 2019