Database missing tables

Even our backups from 6 months ago only have two tables. “pages” and “login”. Posts are nowhere to be found.

Hi @megignite ,

Yes I think you need to start from scratch. Maybe the backup you made is already hacked. Even though you change hosts you need to check the weakness of your wp site. Check the logs if you have stats or error logs to check how did your site was hacked.

Thanks for your feedback @arielicas,

It’s strange as backups we have further than that only have two tables also. The posts have been working the entire time up until our server blocked our site from running. It seems like the database wasn’t set up properly to begin with (I hadn’t created the site originally), is this possible?

I will take a look at the site to check for any weaknesses.

i think if you have the soft copy of the content. Better install the updated wordpress. This will save you time than troubleshooting error ??

The tables of login and pages are both not standard WordPress tables. That’s almost a worry as any normal WordPress installation will never have two tables called that, and there will be (at least) 11 other tables, all starting with the database prefix set out in your wp-config.php file.

If those are the only two tables that you have, you do have a big problem. You may be able to extract the content out of the pages table to cut-and-paste into a new WordPress site, but we can’t be sure it would work until you tried it.

One thing to do is talk to your old hosting company, assuming you still have an active account with them, and see if they have any backups of the full account. Most hosts do keep backups for anywhere up to 30 days, so it may be worth looking at that as well.

Yeah, it has been particularly frustrating as I could see it didn’t follow the proper structure, but there were no other tables in the database to begin with. I’m not sure exactly where the posts were being stored, but it certainly wasn’t on the database.

I have been able to copy and paste content from the pages database backup, but the posts are still nowhere to be found, which is incredibly frustrating since that was our blog for the last year. I figured having a complete database backup would be enough, but obviously that didn’t work out for us. I have never encountered issues like this with databases before, and it seems strange that there are no post tables or generic wordpress structured tables anywhere to be found.

v frustrating

I have complete access to the old home directory, as well as all the old databases, as we are between hosts at this stage. But even our exceptionally old databases and full backups only have those two tables “login” and “pages”. It’s really strange.

Check your database connection details in your wp-config.php file and see which database it’s actually connecting to. There’s no way that a WordPress iste will work only off those two tables, so there has to be a different database somewhere.

Curse of the phantom database. So you’re definitely right, it is somewhere. I have the name, the username, and the password. It is a completely different database and username that we had on file. I’m not sure how the person set the site up initially, but this brings me closer to a solution. Unfortunately as we are in between hosts, it’s a struggle to access phpmyadmin as a different user. I might get in touch with our old provider to check if he can access anything we can’t.