[thelist] Extracting (compressed?) files from a MySQL database

[Nadeem Hosenbokus]

My first guess would be to decode Base64 values.

It's fairly normal to encode data with Base64 when inserting into a
database.

If that doesn't work then I would ask for the original application code and
see what was done to the data before it was inserted into the database.

Thanks,

Nadeem Hosenbokus
(230) 5766 9169
www.nadeemh.com
http://mu.linkedin.com/in/nadeemhosenbokus


-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Roel Mulder
Sent: 06 May 2016 13:47
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: [thelist] Extracting (compressed?) files from a MySQL database

Hi all,
The following challenge is facing me. A client requested me to help get his
files out of a MySQL database. The developer of their system is gone,
history being what it is.

I'm facing 26268 records with a total 1.8GB filesize in MySQL.
What i did in PHP: query the file_content (MEDIUMBLOB), file_name,
file_date, LIMIT 10.

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
  $file = fopen('/var/www/vhosts/path/'.$row['file_name'], 'w+');
  fwrite($file, $row['file_content']);
  fclose($file);
  touch('/var/www/vhosts/path/'.$row['file_name'],
strtotime($row['file_date']));
}

This gives me the files (.doc .docx .pdf .msg), however I can't open them
with their default programs. Opening them in a text editor does show code
and fragments of text.
Could the files be compressed prior to storing in MySQL?
  fwrite($file, gzdeflate($row['file_content']));

Now I can open them with their default program, to see many paged documents
with unreadable text fragments.

Does anyone have suggestions on how to extract them files to usable
conditions?
Cheers, Roel
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