recovery | drupal.org

Backup your database and files

Database and custom file backups are essential.

There are many posts in the forum topics about irrecoverable errors, WSOD, database gone fubar etc. There are times when your site goes awry or gets deleted or corrupted, and the only or best choice is to restore it from a backup.

Backup & Migrate

The Backup & Migrate module facilitates emergency recovery and site migration. You can configure it for automatic backups saved to the filesystem - with more frequent backups during development.

You can also create a manual backup before undertaking any complex configuration. That way, you have a "restore point" in case of disaster.

While there may be some issues of security when you save the database and content as a file (you could exclude certain tables, perhaps), the benefits of having a rollback in case of disaster are significant.

Recovering the administrator password

There are several methods to recover the Drupal administrator ("user 1") password. The fastest way is using drush.

Request new password via e-mail

You can reset your password by requesting a new password at http://www.example.com?q=user/password.

Change password with a database query

Drupal 7

Update administrator password via sql-query in Drupal 7.

Drupal 6 and below

Execute the following query on the Drupal database where 'givememypasswordback' is your new password. You will need to log into your database using phpMyAdmin or another tool.

UPDATE users SET pass = MD5('givememypasswordback') WHERE uid=1;

Recover password with Drush

Drush offers a number of methods to recover the administrator's password.

Generate login-link

Drush can generate a one-time login link.

drush uli

Reset password

drush upwd --password="givememypasswordback" admin

(where "admin" is the user name)

Update password with query

drush sql-query "UPDATE users SET pass = MD5('givememypasswordback') WHERE uid =1;"

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