---
title: "Be Careful When Upgrading to WordPress 2.2 If You Have the WP-Cache Plugin — Adventures in Backing Up and Restoring WordPress Databases"
date: 2007-05-22
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $("
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2007/05/22/backup-and-restore-wordpress/
---
# Be Careful When Upgrading to WordPress 2.2 If You Have the WP-Cache Plugin — Adventures in Backing Up and Restoring WordPress Databases
> Warning: fopen(/home/idrathe1/public_html/wp-content/cache/wp_cache_mutex.lock) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/idrathe1/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase2.php on line 96

I've never had a problem with a mutex.lock!

After several more attempts to upload the 2.2 files, I decided future endeavors would be useless, so I restored back to my 2.1.2 version. Oh boy, here's where the fun starts.
I am very grateful for Podz's tutorials at [http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/](http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/). They are mostly superb. I was nervous when I had to delete all my WordPress files and my entire database, leaving me hanging only with an exported .sql file of 3.5 megs. That's quite an interesting jumble of text to look at, by the way.

Here's what you see as you are dropping [deleting] all your database tables (image from Podz's tutorial):

[![restore](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/restore111.png)](http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/restore/)

Take a deep breath before you click Go. Well, of course I backed up my entire site in two different ways before deleting everything, but still, it's no fun to annihilate database tables.

However, there's an error in Podz's restore instructions. Instead of using the Import function, he says,

> Open the .sql file in a text editor. Do NOT use a word-processor, or Dreamweaver or GoLive unless you REALLY know what you are doing - on a Windows machine WordPad is okay. ... You highlight some text, copy it, paste it into the SQL window, click Go and after the Success message, you do it again with the next chunk of text..

After I opened the .sql file in WordPad and copied it into the SQL window, I had some strange characters that appeared in my posts, namely these: ’ �. It's an encoding issue that happened in the restore, since the Podz tutorials said it was okay to paste content from WordPad into a SQL text box.

I went to bed thinking I'd have to fix each post individually -- this would have taken hours.