The bbconverter is drastically improved and much faster in v2.1 RC2, but when importing from my bbpress1 install (> 360,000 posts) it always fails at some point by just stopping, and when I try to refresh the page it sends me back to the login screen.

My question is how to “resume” the import/convert process after leaving the dashboard and coming back. By checking the “restart” option it sounds like it will resume, but both with it checked and unchecked, when I start it over, it tries to re-import everything again and appends each forum with a /forum-name-1/ slug.

Is there a way to tell it to just import “replies” at this point? I’ve successfully brought over the forums and topics, but each has just the original post.

*Alternatively*, is there a way to reverse it so that the import starts with the most recent posts/replies/etc?? The 360k posts go back several years, and even though it times out on me, if it were importing the most recent first I’d at least have the last few months and my users would be much happier.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 12 years, 6 months ago]

“Restart” is what’s causing the problem, since it literally restarts the import from 0. Don’t tick that box, and it should continue where it left off.

[@tunelab Member 12 years, 6 months ago]

Ahhh, thanks. I’ve been at this for a while, first using Tools > Import, then I installed the bbconverter standalone plugin, and that plugin made it seem like it was the other way around, despite the name “reset.”

This latest version makes it a bit clearer, but I was already “conditioned” by the old version. My fault. Thanks for the help.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 12 years, 6 months ago]

You’re welcome. I tried to clear it up a bit, and you’re right that it’s still a weird experience. If you have improvements, I’d love to see them.

[@tunelab Member 12 years, 6 months ago]

Unfortunately I don’t have the expertise to make any improvements. I do have to ask though… would it be relatively easy to reverse the process to import starting with most recent posts first?

Even though I can continue, I’m still not able to import all of the bbpress standalone install.

Today I was able to sit for 4.5 hours straight and let it run doing 2000 rows at a time, and it made it to 196,000 (out of 361,000), but that’s it. Even though I can resume it, it seems that it “remembers” where it left off by manually checking, 2000 rows at a time, if it’s been done or not, so presumably it would require quite a bit of time at first to check, then resume, and I’m simply not able to stay at a computer long enough to accomplish it. Even disabling sleep on my computer and letting it run all night, it times out sometime overnight.

Any ideas how to get my recent posts? I’m considering making a backup of the database, then using phpmyadmin to manually delete anything more than a year old, then re-running the import tool. Would that work in theory?