Solved Reinstalling Joomla! files after being hacked

I am in the midst of reinstalling all my core files. When I reinstall the Kunena forum component, will I have to do redo all the sections and categories again, or well they automatically appear? I know that everything will be in place in the database, I'm just not sure what will happen after I reinstall the software for the forum.

Hello,

Do-you have keeped the kunena tables (nammed *_kunena_*) in your database ?

Not entirely sure what you mean. My database is exactly the same as it was when it was on the website, I've just got to reinstall it when I put everything back in place.

I wanted to ask another question regarding uploading folders with lots of images and avatars. Paraguay and I have 12,000 members on my website. That is one hell of a lot of avatars that takes literally ages to either upload or download/delete. Is there any way of uploading these individual folders a little quicker? I was wondering if I could zip the folder to make it small in size, then months is uploaded, unzip it. Does that make sense

Mind you, I shall be using Akeeba so I think this may reduce everything in size already, can't remember, I haven't used it for ages.

If the Kunena tables are still here, you can launch the installation of Kunena 4.0.6 and the data will be here.

For upload the images and attachments, if you have SSH access you can zip it and upload it.

Oscarfishlover wrote: I am in the midst of reinstalling all my core files. When I reinstall the Kunena forum component, will I have to do redo all the sections and categories again, or well they automatically appear? I know that everything will be in place in the database, I'm just not sure what will happen after I reinstall the software for the forum.

The short answer to your question is yes.

One of my [last remaining J! 1.5] websites was recently hacked—most of the Joomla PHP files were destroyed—but my Kunena-based forum was unaffected. As I have written before in this place, there are three essential things that you need in order to install or re-install Kunena on a Joomla website:

1. the Joomla user database tables (including the Joomla ACL table);
2. the Kunena database tables; and
3. the attachment files

It is possible to re-install Kunena even if some of the original tables are missing. The forum sections and categories are defined in the table _kunena_categories. As long as you have this table, your will not have to redo your forum sections and categories. When you distill Kunena down to its very "core", it consists of three database tables: _kunena_categories, _kunena_messages, _kunena_messages_text. If you lose any of these three tables you can, basically, kiss your old forum good-bye. The other database tables are important but they are really the "icing on the cake". If any database table is missing, at the time you perform the Kunena installation procedure, it will be added again but, obviously, with default column values.

Oscarfishlover wrote: I wanted to ask another question regarding uploading folders with lots of images and avatars. I was wondering if I could zip the [files from my old site] ... then unzip [them on my new site]. ... I shall be using Akeeba so I think this may reduce everything in size already, can't remember, I haven't used it for ages.

Short answer to your question is yes. You can use Akeeba Backup to create an archive of the avatars and attachments files, copy the .JPA (or .ZIP) archive file to your reconstructed site, and then use Akeeba Kickstart to unzip the files into their same relative locations. There's only one condition for this to be able to work: the condition is that you can login to the backend of your old/hacked site and that you can still use Akeeba Backup there.

I would have used this method except that I could not login to the Joomla administrator part of my hacked website. Under conditions like those you would need some other mechanism of making an archive file (in .ZIP or some other format). As xillibit wrote, if you have direct console access to both sites—the hacked site and the site you're reconstructing—then you could perform the zipping and unzipping if you are a "dab hand" at using SSH commands. SSH is not for total novice users.

The short answer, however, is yes.

Sorry to hear you had these troubles, mate. You know where to find me if you ever need one-on-one guidance/reassurance or whatever else I can do to help.

I hadn't got around to updating to the latest kunena version, I think I still had that 3.4 installed. Can I go ahead and install the latest version, or do I have to install the previous version I was using then go through the updates until I reached the latest version?