Migration issues: smf_messages table ouside the forum database?

[urielmx]

Hi everyone. I swear that I did my research abut this and didn't find anything, so this post is necessary.

I'm migrating a forum from one hosting provider to another. The first hosting provider was disk space unlimited, which was nice (this is related, I swear) but it's closing it's servers so it was needed to move out. I got a database backup and it's now restored in the new server. All the config was fixed with the magical 'repair_settings.php'... but not a single message is there!

Here begin the problems:
The forum is showing a mysql error that Table 'smf_messages' doesn't exist... and it's true! But it's not a php error in the backup or something: the database doesn't contained that table.
Doing some research over the old hosting I found a huge (10gb) sql backup named smf_messages.sql, but is this normal? Will I be able to restore that table in my new host?

About the huge file (What could have happened):
I remember that some time ago the site was under attack by spammers and they succeeded creating fake accounts and by this way inserting their SPAM. I kicked them out, but may be I did it wrong and the messages still there. About this: can I just detect some pattern and delete all the spam messages in order to avoid upploading all the file to the new host?

Thanks in advance for your help.
Thanks for reading, even if you don't have any idea what's happening!

[Illori]

did you backup/restore the database as well as the files?

[urielmx]

Thank for your answer Illori.

Yes everything is backed up and restored.

There's something that could be important to mention. The backups I downloaded from the old host were restored, so the backup is not (necessarily) the one that was in production.

This was because I stopped paying my old host, cause I supposed that I had all backed up, but one of the sql backups was corrupted (or that's what I thought), so I payed to restore those files and download them again.

[Illori]

can you check in the database to confirm that the messages table exists?

[urielmx]

I can, and it does not. It jumps from smf_message_icons to smf_moderators 

If you mean that if it exists in the downloaded .sql file: it does not, either.

[Illori]

then you may be out of luck.

[urielmx]

That's for sure! 

I'm downloading the monster database smf_messages that I mentioned I found. I'll try to clean it from SPAM and use it as backup.

I'll update you if it works!

[urielmx]

It worked. I never knew why it was there such table, but it has the needed rows.