Before you install a modification (mod), you should back up your forum and files. If you forgot to do this, however, and the mod which you installed broke your forum such that you cannot even uninstall it, there may still be a way to fix your forum.
SMF takes a file backup for you. It does this each time you install something, and restoring the files will take them back to the way they were just before your most recent install.
To restore the backup, you need to follow these steps:
- Open FTP or whichever file manager that comes with your hosting service.
- Look in your forum's "Packages" directory to find another directory named "backups". Suppose that the last mod which you installed was "PM On Registration", and that you did this on 26 Jan 2012. In the aforementioned "backups" directory, you would find the file 2012-01-26_before_PM_On_Registration_1-0-2.tar.gz
- Download that file to a convenient directory on your desktop computer and extract it. To extract a "tar.gz" file on a Windows operating system, use a program like winzip.
- Upload the files and directories from this file to your forum to overwrite what is there now.
Once complete, your forum files should be exactly as they were before you installed the mod. This procedure does not restore a backup of your database nor touch the database in any way.
