[solved] How to restore an old backup of plone?

I archived a plone installation from many years back and am curious what content is in there. I'd like to explore it if at all possible and then make the determination to extract it then. I haven't run plone for over a decade, so I'm a complete newbie. That said, I have a zinstance directory and see blob storage. I am thinking that while I could perhaps extract files somehow directly, if I had it running, I would keep the structure intact and can explore it more intuitively.

I am unable to start plone.

From the versions.cfg, I see that it is plone 4.3.1.

The zinstance directory has a readme which explains how to start plone. It expects plone to be installed under /usr/local/Plone, so I have done that. I have also installed python 2.7, but in some other location (platform / OS default). When attempting to start plone, I get:

/usr/local/Plone/Python-2.7/bin/python: error while loading shared libraries: libpython2.7.so.1.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I have symlinked the library:

ln -s libpython2.7.so.1 libpython2.7.so.1.0

I am guessing that python is not where plone is expecting it to be.

How can I get this old archive running again so that I may view the content?

Walter via Plone Community wrote at 2023-10-21 12:11 +0000:

...
I am unable to start plone.
...
/usr/local/Plone/Python-2.7/bin/python: error while loading shared libraries: libpython2.7.so.1.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Apparently, your Python does not start.
You first must ensure that Python is functional before you
can hope that Plone will start.

I have symlinked the library:
ln -s libpython2.7.so.1 libpython2.7.so.1.0

Did this help?
Is Python now starting?

I am guessing that python is not where plone is expecting it to be.

The error message above tells you that some Python
(the one in "/usr/local/Plone/Python-2.7") is gotten started
(but failed).

How can I get this old archive running again so that I may view the content?

Difficult to say.
I would replace "/usr/local/Plone/Python2.7" with a fresh
Python 2.7 installation.

If you want your Python 2.7 in a different location
(the default would by "/usr/local/lib/Python2.7"),
then you can install there and make "/usr/local/Plone/Python2.7"
a "virtualenv" derived from this Python.

Once you have Python running successfully,
you can try again with Plone.

I found a better alternative which I didn't think was possible.

  1. download plone installer, 4.3.6 [launchpadlibrarian], close enough to what I was previously running (4.3.1)
  2. install
  3. move data files
    zinstance/var/blobstorage
    zinstance/var/filestorage
  4. start plone
    zinstance/plonectl start
  5. navigate to plone site
  6. backup any media of interest

When I posted this, I didn't believe I could just move my data into a brand new installation, I thought it would be more complex than that. That was all that I needed to do. Also, I never thought I would find a close version to what I had installed at that point in time. From the data, it appears that I last used this about 9 years ago!

This works well because there are no addons.

You could also have edited the startup files to replace the old python 2.7 path to the new one.