Change of computer

Support
2

Hi tristanic,

First off, you didn’t do anything wrong. You simply did what you would do with any other app. With almost all other apps, you can simply reinstall the program on your new drive or computer and it will pick up your files right where you left off.

Local is different. It requires you to export the site on the old installation and reimport it on the new one. In theory, that’s simple. In practice, not so much. As in your case, you might not be aware that you have to do this. Or maybe your HDD or SSD crashed and you have no way of recovering it. You probably have a backup, but how do you export the site from your crashed HDD? You can’t.

The developers of Local should have seen this coming and offered a simple way to reimport an existing site, either from the original drive, as in your case, or from a Time Machine (MacOS) or Acronis (Windows) backup. I’ve made this point before, and it seems like it should be a top priority. Ideally, it should be drag and drop simple: just drag the site folder onto the app and boom, you’re done.

That said, here are some things you can try to recover your site.

  1. If you were using a backup plugin on your site (e.g., UpdraftPlus, BackWPUp, etc.) one thing you could do would be to create a new site in Local with the same name, and then use the backup plugin to restore the old files and database. I’ve done things like this before and it should work. This is the first thing I would try.

  2. As far as I’m aware, the official way to recover from a situation like yours is given by Clay in this thread. You have to create a new site with the same name, replace the folder with your existing site, and then get Local to reimport the database files.

  1. If you weren’t using a backup plugin and solution 2 doesn’t work, all the files in your site, including a copy of the database, are saved in the site folder. The site files (theme, etc) are in mysite/app/public. The database is in mysite/app/sql. The only problem is that Local breaks the database up into separate files by table. What you would have to do is reassemble the tables into a whole database. I’ve never done that, but I’m sure there’s a way. It probably involves creating a blank database and importing the tables one by one. Once you have a whole database you can create a new site, copy over the files in the mysite/app/public/wp-content folder and reimport the database. I know it sounds like a lot of work but it’s all doable.

Clay may have some better ideas but these are mine.

Good luck!