Magento Database item Export wamp mysql

Question

Here's the deal,

I lost some products from my site, they were erased by mistake somehow.

I have a backup of a site (just content files) from before moving to a new server and losing the products
I have a backup of a database of the above site after it had been moved to another server, but before having lost the products

I figured if I can host the site that I have backed up in localhost (on my wamp server) then at least I can look at the site before things were lost. - I would use the backup files and the backup database.

First question: is it possible to do this? i.e. to host a site from backups of files and databases that were generated at different times. - If so, how?
Here is what I've tried so far:

1. create alias directory pointing backup files.
2. import database to mysql (I had to do this via command line because it was too big)
   I was not able to associate the imported files with the the alias directory.

So then I tried:

1. new alias directory with a fresh magento installation
2. replace new installation directory files with backup files
3. merge new installation database with backup database
   I don't think I was successful in this - the backup database being so big I had to use command prompt...

Needless to say that didn't work.

So, I went back to my first theory: trying to extract just the lost items from the database i.e. find them by sku number and extract them from all their corresponding tables.

Question #2: Is there a way to do this?

BTW this is my very first foray into database management, wamp, or any of this stuff. (my degree was in philosophy, and not the modern "existential download your memories to a computer" type, but the ancient type like "the world is made out of earth, air, fire, water, love, and captain planet" type) and to me "coding" means html, css, and copy pasting php scripts so please be nice.

If I can't do either of the things I tried above, I'll resign myself to inputing the each products back in the store manually via the magento dashboard interface.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

This should definitely be possible as long as any changes in between two time period were minimal.

I suggest that you test this with a staging environment first.

To do so, create new directory and a new database.

After that, update "/app/etc/local.xml" to reflect the

new database name, username, password

and clear all caches and sessions under "/var/caches" and "/var/sessions".

You may also need to update the Base URL to reflect your staging environment or dev installation in the "core_config_data" table in the database.

Clear all caches after you change the Base URL.