Can you Merge two versions of the same forum back together?

[Fearless Freap]

This may be a pipe dream, and I have looked through some other threads but I don't think they applied to what I am thinking about here.

I created a forum, then after several months wanted to try something different with it.  I backed up the forum and deleted a portion of it and kept another fraction of it.  Now after several months, I am reconsidering and would like to know if I could rejoin the backed up version of my forum with the current version of my forum to get me back to the whole thing.

I am using SMF 2 RC3 in both cases. 

Thanks,

Steve

[Oldiesmann]

So you have two separate forums and want to merge them together?

Unfortunately that's not an easy task. It can be done, but there's no easy way to do it short of manually doing all the work yourself.

[Fearless Freap]

It's the same forum... Uhm, 

Let's say it started in March, and ran it through July all in the same year.  There were a total of 10 boards.  In August, I deleted all but one board after I did a complete backup.

Now from August to November the forum has continued.   Is there a way to bring back the first half of the year and merge it with the second half of the year?

Thanks,

Steve

[Kindred]

Assuming you deleted the stuff from the smf admin and not the database, yes... you should be able to take the backup, and the update all of the tables with the new information just by doing an INSERT on the tables...

TAKE  A NEW BACKUP FIRST!!!

using your old DB as a starting point, find the last item in the boards table and then INSERT the new ones.
find the last post in the messages table and INSERT the new ones...
you'll have to check the other tables as well...
it's going to be a little complicated, because all of the user pointers, etc might be off to start with (run a recount of all forum stats after doing this)

[Fearless Freap]

Excellent... thank you for your help.