Thanks, Ken!
I've actually done a lot of moves with .mbz files, but I was always using them without the user data in them. I had no idea that they had the full accounts in them. I wish I'd known that; it would have saved me a lot of trouble.
>You've not been successful in restoring any courses?
I've gotten courses to go in without trouble... as long as none of the students had changed their email address in their profile. If I restore without users, there's no problem; I just enroll the teacher back in after restoring. I'd just love to keep the users if possible.
I actually asked the teachers to do resets before I took the site down, but of course no one did.
>Exception to what I've said ... plugins ... if you've used addons in old
site, install compat versions in new site *before* restoring courses
that used them.
Everything is installed on the new site.
>do know that the version you are running will not be 'forever' ... you
will have to upgrade the site ... which really is much easier if you do
that when versions are closer.
Here's the longer form of why this has happened: I had been serving this off of a spare Mac using the old "macOS Server" application. They took webserver administration out of that awhile back, and their setup was so bizarre that I could never get the webserver to survive OS or Apache upgrades. I finally just started from scratch with another Mac Mini we had, and set up a standard Apache/PHP/MySQL install. I had hoped to just move over the moodle, moodledata, and MySQL database from the old server and then do an upgrade from Moodle 3.1 to 3.9, but I couldn't get the old Moodle to run in the new environment at all. So I decided to do it this ridiculous way instead. I'd been marooned for a long time.
Most of my backups aren't too big, but in the case of my personal classes (I'm the heaviest user, of course), I'm going to have to bump up those PHP and MySQL values for sure.
I have set expectations low for my teachers, but obviously I'd like the most stuff to transfer over as possible.
Thanks again, and I'll do some database surgery and try again.
I'll let you know what happens.