Restoring related products from database back up

Question

All of our related products have disappeared. If I look in the database the 'catalog_product_link' table is empty.

I have a db backup which has the data in it. Can I just import the data from the back up into the 'catalog_product_link' and 'catalog_product_link_attribute_int' tables or is there more to it?

Note that I can't just restore the full database from the backup - it's too old and too much has potentially changed

The products are a mixture of both configurable and simple with visibility set to catalog/search

Using Magento CE 1.8

Answer 1

I did a test import for both tables on a dev site using phpmyadmin and csv files from the backup database. Came across some constraint errors where products did not exist and after clearing those from the csv everything seemed OK.

I don't think that restoring the data to the attribute table was strictly necessary (turns out that the position hadn't been set for the related products anyway)

Bottom line is that importing data back to the 'catalog_product_link' table restored the related products in both the back and front end successfully.

Note: there is an explanation here of what the 'catalog_product_link_attribute_int' table is for (Magento table defenition).

This may not be the best way to fix this problem but it does work.