Problem With Cleaning Up Old Server Stuff

  • Hi Folks,

    I’ve been running a CMS website of one sort or another as hobby since 2003. For the past six years I’ve been using WordPress. Since using WordPress I’ve played with building and deleting websites as “science projects,” played with different plugins, and done a lot of blogging/Photo albums on my primary site.

    Along the way, I’ve migrated to different hosting companies four times now (I think). I currently run 12 websites, all but two are WordPress (one is Moodle, one is a proprietary genealogy site). In my most recent migration last month, I’ve run into issues with apparent old juke that was migrated over. My current hosting service shows I have 400,000 files in my account and 27 databases.

    So I can account for 12 databases, and suspect a few more are leftover from old websites I killed. But there’s at least 10 DBs I can’t account for by name. The naming convention for these are [account name]_ss_dbname[three-digit number]. I can’t trace these back to any website, but table names appear to be WordPress tables (by names).

    So my question; How do I trace back what these databases support? If I delete them, and they turn out to be important, does restoring from a backup file restore the structure?

    Thanks.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator Steven Stern (sterndata)

    (@sterndata)

    Volunteer Forum Moderator

    Look for wp-config.php files as those will contain pointers to the associated databases. You can also look at the first few rows of each wp_options table as they’ll give you the URL of the site it supports.

    DJ

    (@itsjustdj)

    Without being able to peek into your phpMyAdmin, I would suggest:

    First, export one of those DBs you don’t recognize (make sure to check all the tables). Save the .sql file to your local machine. Then check your websites and make sure everything is still up (it should be). If it is, then you can delete that DB.

    If something goes wonky with one of your sites, then import the DB back into phpMyAdmin and it should be okay again. But I suspect those DBs you can’t account for are junk.

    Thread Starter RedTravelMaster

    (@redtravelmaster)

    Thanks Steven, DJ, for your tips.

    Ron

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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