Since 2002 I've run a reasonably successful MT blog at http://blog.dave.org.uk/. Currently that blog is running on MT 4.01. There are about 1,500 entries in this blog and thousands of comments.

Just before Christmas, the server hosting that blog had a disk failure. At the time I didn't have access to any of the data from the disk.

In order to be able to keep blogging, I pointed the DNS at a new server and installed MT 4.01 from scratch on this new server. Currently I have about half a dozen entries in this new blog.

I've also been trying to access the data in the old blog and yesterday I managed to finally get hold of an SQL dump of the old MT database. Obviously I'd like to import the old entries and comments (and also, if possible, the categories, templates and other objects) into the new blog.

I haven't tried it yet, but I suspect that the problem will be that the new blog entries will duplicate the primary keys on the initial entries from the old blog - so I can't just insert the old data.

My current plan is to identify all of the problematic primary keys and to update the values in the new database so that they are all greater than the highest value from the old database. I'll also have to ensure that all the foreign keys remain in step.

That sounds possible, but an awful lot of work. I'm not sure that I know enough about the MT database structure to ensure that I catch all of the keys.

So I wondered if anyone had any alternative suggestions? Another thing I'm considering is to create a second blog on the new server and load the old data into that. I could then export the data and import it into the new blog. Would that be easier? Are there any potential issues doing this? How much of the blog's structure is carried over in an export/import operation?

I'm happy writing Perl and SQL - it's just the specifics of the MT structures that I'm not clear on.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Dave...