Restoring older site version

Support
1

Hi, how do I restore an older version of a local site? Thank you

2

Hi Raine,

Local does not have automatic backups at this time. Your best bet is to use a previous backup that you have or to use Time Machine on macOS if you have it set up.

If you do have a previous backup, you can drag and drop it onto Local’s main window to import the backup as a new site.

P.S. We have plans for adding automatic backups into Local in the future :slight_smile:

3

How do i access the site via FTP then? I’m confused the theme was broken and apparently now there is the only way to restore it

4

The site is on your local file system so there isn’t an FTP server in Local. To see the files for a site simply click on the little circle arrow by the site path. It looks like this:

15 AM

After clicking that button, you should see a folder containing an app folder. Go into that, then public, and you should see all of the WordPress files including wp-content.

5

YES!!! Broken Theme deleted and restored through the dashboard again. thank you so much for your help!!!

6

Rock on, glad to hear!

Please let us know if we can help with anything else.

7

Yeah please can you help - I am very much newb to most of this, I made several sites locally for launching in New Year, then resigned myself to upgrade to windows 10 pro. Then had to reinstall local by flywheel and VM.
Thing is I have nearly 10-15 sites I now can’t import (as I used the 3 in 1 for backup and export) and wondering what I have or am doing wrong? Really hope this makes sense as it’s even confusing me what I have wrote :confused:

8

As I understand it, the import process requires a zipped site file with a copy of the database. This can be achieved in two ways:

  1. Exporting the old site from the previous installation of Local, which I’m guessing you no longer have access to.
  2. Zipping up a copy of the site with a copy of the database, assuming you have it. If you don’t have the database, there is an export in the app/sql folder. I would think you could use that.

If you happen to have a backup of the site, generated by a plugin like UpdraftPlus, you could create a new site in Local and then import the backup from your old site.

A feature I would like to see would be for Local to import a site folder “as is.” But that doesn’t seem to exist right now.

9

Just a clarification on my previous post:

In MacOS and Local Beta 5.1.1, it’s easy to import an existing site. All you need to do is to compress the folder of the site you want to import and then use Local’s import function.

For example, suppose that your workstation has failed unexpectedly and all you have are backups of your site folders. You’ve got a new workstation and you’ve reinstalled Local, but now you need to reimport all your sites. Here’s how to do it in Local Beta 5.1.1 (and maybe the production release of Local, too, but I haven’t tried it):

  1. Navigate to the folder that contains your site.
  2. Inside this folder, you should find another folder named “app”. Inside that folder there should be folders named “public” and “sql.” The public folder contains your site’s files. The sql folder contains one or more database dumps that were made when the site was last stopped. If you open the sql folder you should see a file named “local.sql”. That’s a copy of your database.
  3. If you’ve got all that, the rest is easy. Just right click the site folder and choose “compress”. This will create a zip file of your site.
  4. Go to Local Beta and import that zip file (File>Import Site).
  5. The result should be a functional site in Local. Rinse and repeat until you’ve got all your sites back.