I had to move an abandoned Discourse forum. Luckily, we had multiple admins, so it was possible to do and download a backup. We used a S3 bucked for our assets, which was kind of a problem. I’ll make a feature request at this point:
Make it possible to include S3 assets into backups
I found out (not sure if it was before or after rebaking the posts), that S3 asset URLs got rewritten to internal ones. So I extracted all original and optimized S3 URLs out of the database file and downloaded them (kind of) manually. After moving them to the right place, all missing images got displayed. … It would be great to have an automatic feature for that.
If it’s not too late (that is, there’s traffic on the forum that’s happened and you don’t want to lose) and you have the S3 credentials, then I’d probably put the s3 credentials in the app.yml and re-run the restore. From there, you could probably set the hidden setting, do a backup, and restore it on a server without S3.
But I think that’s not the case. And it’s not clear just what the issues might be since even you don’t remember exactly what you did when.
If stuff is missing (and you have s3 credentials), I might try using some S3 tool to pull down all of the uploads and then hack at the database to get it to point to them. But I am not good enough at that to explain here how to do it.