I recently downgraded a D6 site to D5 and the Backup & Migrate module made it pretty easy.

For more details see http://drupal.org/node/320099

Once the D6 data was migrated to D5, several fields need to be manually added to the database, including "description" in the system table and "score" and "users" in the comments table.

It would be awesome if you added a selector for the target Drupal version (5.x or 6.x) with the appropriate fields created.

I presume this would also be helpful migrating from D5 to D6...

Comments

ronan’s picture

ronan commented
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

My goal is to backup the database without interpreting or modifying it in significantly. I'm not sure I understand your feature exactly but it does sound like I'd have to make some assumptions about the structure of the DB and it would require the module to have knowledge of the full D5 and D6 schema (not to mention contrib) which is probably beyond the scope of the module (and beyond my ability to maintain).

I also do not want to claim any support for downgrading Drupal. I'm glad yours worked out, but that is not an operation to be taken lightly and I doubt I can come up with a foolproof method that would work universally (and foolproofidness is a primary goal of this module).

In all, if I'm understanding you correctly, I think this may be a little beyond the scope of the module, but the latest version has lots of hooks and callbacks that would allow an interested party to use Backup and Migrate if he or she wanted to write an seperate automatic downgrader module.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

decibel.places’s picture

decibel.places commented

several fields need to be manually added to the database, including "description" in the system table and "score" and "users" in the comments table.

It would be awesome if you added a selector for the target Drupal version (5.x or 6.x) with the appropriate fields created.

I think you can safely assume the installation will have the "system" and "comments" tables.

I'm proposing a selector that would add or drop these columns depending on the v number.

I am finding D6 pretty usable lately and only had to downgrade one site this month, so it would be a handy feature to help the migration of D5 to D6.

Just automate the dropping and addition of columns in some of the core tables by both versions...

(and D7 soon?)

I may try my hand at a contrib module under B&M for this, but I'm kinda stacked up on work - anybody?

ronan’s picture

ronan commented

Actually this module does not deal with database tables on a field by field basis at all. Dropping entire tables is one thing, but I don't intend to slice and dice data to the extent you're talking about.

As for adding fields during an upgrade, that should be done by update.php. There should be no need to manually edit tables to upgrade Drupal versions.

If you do want to work on a contrib downgrader let me know as I'll have to add some per-table and per-row filter hooks (which I was planning to do at some point anyway). Right now the filters are per file (for encrpyption, compression etc.)

Thanks
Ronan

decibel.places’s picture

decibel.places commented

I see your points...

I guess I'll put helping you with this on my to-do list for... 2012?

Thanks for the great work on the B&M module - just today BlueHost dropped the connection to all my databases (my site, acouple in dev, my Gallery portfolio) - but I was less panicked knowing I had some scheduled backups just in case! They came back on line fine...

There always remains a few things that just have to be done by hand, separates the men from the boys...