I’m usually able to simply copy/paste the last site I made for her and customize it for the new year and school. However, the last reunion site I did included a photo gallery. And, apparently, the extension I used to provide the photo gallery functionality stashed a bunch of images into the DB.

Which means, of course, when I went to copy the last site’s DB, the SQL file was rather large – 57 MB – much larger than GoDaddy will allow for importing into a new DB via phpMyAdmin.

GoDaddy tech support turned me on to this new technique. If you arrived here through a search on this subject, I hope it helps. I couldn’t find anything about it when I needed it.

Note: This information is only relevant to people using GoDaddy hosting accounts who need to import a large SQL file. I also assume you know how to get around GoDaddy’s control panels.

1. Dump the old database into a SQL file. If it’s less than 2 or 3 MB, you can probably just use phpMyAdmin for the import and skip all of what follows.
2. On the NEW hosting account, create a fresh MySQL DB using the tools GoDaddy provides.
3. After the setup of the DB is complete (takes several minutes), do a backup of the new DB. Yes, even though it’s empty.
4. Again, this will take a few minutes. While you’re waiting FTP the SQL file from the old DB into the _db_backups directory in your HTML directory.
5. Go back to your NEW DB, and do a restore. It will ask you which file you want to use. Use the big fat SQL file you just FTP’d to the new hosting account.
6. The new DB will be populated with the old DB’s content.

If you found this page and used this workaround, let me know. Thanks.