Second demo installation 5.3 erased first site

Hi there!

I had installed a trial edition of version 5.3, which was working and our web designer had nearly finished the demo design. Now I tried to instal the trial edition a second time (for a second web site) to a different directory. But the setup installed the files to the original (first) folder, just added a "default2" folder. When I saw that the second installation will take place on the first site, I canceled it (when I was asked for the SQL-Server settings). But the first installation is gone - just "You see this screen because there are no pages created yet." at the main page.

I only have a SQL database backup of the first site. Restoring of the database didn't work. How can I restore the first demo installation? Or is the demo site unrecoverable?

My server settings are:

Windows Server 2008 R2 (IIS 7.5)

root path at IIS: C:\Program Files (x86)\Telerik\Sitefinity 5.3\_EmptyProject\

Thanks a lot!

Gery

Hello Gerald,

The Sitefinity web installer installs Sitefinity in a default folder located in Program Files or a custom folder chosen by the user. Under that folder there are the Sitefinity.exe and two folders, the "_emptyProject" folder and the Projects folder. If you like to have another web site, you don't need to install Sitefinity again. You need to open the Sitefinity project manager from the Sitefinity.exe and click on the "Create new project" button. It will prompt you to set a location for your new project on your hard drive.

When you install Sitefinity, the installer sets up a default project in the Projects folder and configures it automatically. If you run the installer again, it will create a default project with different index (e.g. Default2) because we don't erase old projects. The _emptyProject folder is a system folder for Sitefinity and it is not advisable to edit its contents. You can amend the contents of each Project folder inside the "Projects" folder. If you have worked in the _emptyProject folder, and if you have installed Sitefinity again, the changes you have made in that folder are lost. If you have a Sitefinity database and if you would like to set the connection string of your project to point to the database, you need to go to the ..\App_Data\Sitefinity\Configuration\DataConfig.config file in your project folder and change the connection string in that file.

Kind regards,
Tosho Toshev
the Telerik team

Hello Tosho!

Thank you for your answer. In the meantime I came to the same conclusion: Never use the _EmptyProject-Folder. It was a simple misunderstanding on my side to use this folder. The other guys from the support tried to restore the data from the database, but it was not possible in an economical amount of time (not less than 2 days which is the time to rebuild the site manually). Additionally the inital installed database was version 5.3, when I reinstalled the files were upgraded to 5.4 which made the situation worse.

Conclusion:

.) Always make a backup of the database AND the config files and .) don't try to install SiteFinity twice on the same machine

I reinstalled SiteFinity (once) and started designing the sites from scratch.

Thank you for your support!

Best regards,

Gerald