Import a very old WordPress Version into new WordPress

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Here is my problem: I have been blogging for about six years now at Blogsome.com. I’ve had no problems with it whatsoever, until a few days ago, when they suddenly announced that they were going to close down on a very short notice. So at the moment I’m looking for a new blog.

At the moment I’m thinking of going for a cheap hosted server. My problem is that I want to import all my old posts in the latest version of WordPress. This is problematic because:

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  • The SQL dump I got out of their backup page is really big (about
    30MB). Will this safely import into a new WordPress site?
  • Blogsome never updated their WordPress version, so it has been stuck
    at WordPress Version 1.5.1 for more than half a decade now. How can
    this SQL dump be safely imported into a new version of WordPress?
    It’s unfortunately the only way I managed to export my blog’s
    database. Blogsome does offer a WRX-file backup option, but that one
    unfortunately is broken.

So what would be the smartest way to handle this?

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3 comments

  1. I would use a step by step strategy.
    1) Make a local installation of WP using XAAMP or similarl
    2) Get 1.5.1 version from wp repository
    3) Import all and check all is fine
    4) Do a backup of imported data
    5) Get a more recent version like 2.0 or so
    6) Update and check all is ok and do a backup
    7) Repeat step 5 and 6 with 2.5 then 3.0 and then latest WP version

    Probably moving from 1.5.1 to 3.2.1 directly will work flawlessy, but a 2 3 step upgrade would be better so any upgrade habve to update less data in the DB and there is no risk to timeout half the way. Doing it locally help you configuring large memory footprint for WP (256MB or so), long timeout time for PHP 15 mins or so.. assuring you can update large amount of datea at every step. DOing locally it’s easy and you can make backupd and update faster than online. ANd you will end with a backup of last versione of WP you can upload to your new host

  2. Welcome to WPSE!

    You will probably run in some limitations here.

    On most webhosting servers, there is a limit in uploading a file over PHP. This could be lower than your 30MB SQL dumb. You could try to import your sql dump on the new shared hosting server via phpMyAdmin. If this doesn’t work, you have to use another tool for this step (e.g. MySQLDumper or SequelPro (Mac only).

    If you haven’t a working WRX file, the WordPress Importer Plugin could be skipped. Therefore I would suggest to upgrade step by step.

    1. Import your SQL dump via phpMyAdmin/MySQLDumper
    2. Download&Configure WordPress in version 1.5.1 from the download archive. Use the same (old) DB name and prefix inside wp-config.php.
    3. Run the install script of WordPress. If Blogsome has used a default installation of WordPress, this should be working.
    4. Upgrade to a higher version of WordPress (e.g. 2.0)
    5. Upgrade to the next major release of WordPress (e.g. 3.0)

    A direct upgrade from 1.5.1 to the latest WordPress version will probably not work. I haven’t testet this.

  3. Another option (if you don’t mind to get your hands a little dirty) is just to install the latest version and write some SQL scripts to migrate your data from the old wordpress content tables to the new ones. Probably the differences will not be huge so most of the time you’ll be doing a one-to-one mapping