Joomla!®Plug

Hi Ovidiu,

when I moved my sites to another server in October last year I had problems with the so called German umlauts (mutated vowels ä ö ü) and I opened a support ticket. (I have attached our mails that followed afterwards as a text file for further information.) As this might be a quite common problem for German users working with JoomlaCloner or Xcloner I open this thread.

Finally you said that it was a problem of my server configuration (Apache 2.2.3 CentOS, PHP-Version 5.2.1, MySQL-Version 5.0.22), which is not completely correct. It is true that I had to add this

AddDefaultCharset off
#AddDefaultCharset None

at the beginning of my .htaccess. But it did not work before we imported the sql file via root. After that everything was fine.

Now I don't use JoomlaCloner and XCloner any more backing up my sql data. That's a pity but I don't want to take the risk to have these problems again. I do use Xcloner stand alone to backup my sites (except databases).

Backing up my databases I use
http://www.mysqldumper.de/ now.

The developer of this tool did a lot of research about problems with German umlauts and backing up mysql databases. You can read here what he has found out:

http://www.drummy.org/archives/37/1/ (English version)

http://forum.mysqldumper.de/viewtopic.php?p=18365 (German version)

This might even help you, Ovidiu, to improve Xcloner for German users.

Best wishes
Martin

##attachment removed as it contains private details

If you would look at the backup generated by that tool and the XCloner backups, i think you will find the content being the same, specially in the character encoding issue!

The issue you have on your server is at import, not sure if you followed my last advice from that ticket reply with the "Character set to the file" option

Regards, Ovidiu

Hi Ovidiu,

first of all I want to point out that I do not intent to blame JoomlaCloner or Xcloner of not beeing working. I still use XCloner stand alone to backup, restore und move my website installations. Here it does a pritty good job, very reliable and easy to handle. And I am quite sure I'd say this about JoomlaCloner and XCloner database backups as well if I was a non German user.

If you search German boards about the umlaut issue you will see that it is a common trouble people have dealing with mysql databases. So we are discussing a problem that seems to be specific for German mysql users in general. But as I assume it will not be an issue for non German JoomlaCloner/Xcloner users.

It looks as if the mysql umlaut issue is not yet very well understood even on German boards. Therefore I linked to this explanation above, as I did not find anything of comparable expertise. But you have to take time to get into it.

So my main intent is to inform other German JoomlaCloner/XCloner users who will be stumbling over this problem sooner or later. On a second level I think this article could give you, Ovidiu, some hints towards this very specific problem your German users have to deal with.

As I am a non professional and far from being an expert neither in developping nor in databases I may be wrong in what I have said so far.

Concerning this support ticket we are talking about you say:
... not sure if you followed my last advice from that ticket reply ...

I want to emphasize that I had been trying everything you recommended, without any success, as I told you. When you said I had to turn to my hoster on behalf of my server configurations I did. What else should I have done? Actually we didn't change anything about my server configuration apart from these two lines in .htaccess. And this didn't even help at first.

You say:
The issue you have on your server is at import ...

Of course I had an importing problem. When I bought the cloner and your support I expected this would help me to avoid exactly this kind of problems. Eventually the database has been imported by my hoster using server root access. This finally brought success altogether with that changement in .htaccess. So it is a matter of fact that my importing problem has been solved by my hoster.

You say:
If you would look at the backup generated by that tool and the XCloner backups, i think you will find the content being the same, specially in the character encoding issue!

In this case we won't be able any more to find out if this would have been so or not. So it doesn't make sense to discuss it. Comparisons in general I have to leave to the experts.

But in my opinion mysqldumper is more user friendly about mysql database backups. And there are features provided that the XCloner doesn't have yet. For example it can read the default mysql server character set. Than there is a converting tool provided in case you have to use backup files that have been made by other backup tools.

As far as XCloner and my website backups are concerned, Ovidiu, I am looking forward to our good relationship going on.

Kind regards
Martin

We appreciate your time in getting this analyzed, we have moved the topic to Suggestions, we will have a closer look at this issue!

Regards, Ovidiu