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While doing some testing on a client’s website backup — and I hope you are making backups of your website — we encountered an issue where restoring the database to our development server kept failing. This obviously wasn’t a good sign; if we can’t restore a client’s website then their backups are effectively worthless.

After some troubleshooting, we managed to narrow things down to a couple entries in just 1 database table (hey, not so bad anymore, right?) I suspected it had something to do with the stored data itself — either it was using a combination of characters that killed the import or it was simply too big. After more testing, searching the InterWebz and reading more documentation and help forums we fixed the issue by changing the following MySQL settings in the my.ini file:

  • innodb_log_file_size – increased to 10M
  • max_allowed_packet – increased to 10M

Yes, this means that the data was too big to be imported using the previous settings.