Thanks Anthony - I shall adopt your "trinity". I am also using the (brilliant) flexpage package. It adds files to blocks, mod, course/format and theme so its pretty spread about. Your 'patches' folder seems a good idea for that and like no-standard additions.
I guess I was not clear about MySQL. The database dump and restore was no problem - I did it with the MySQL tools (mysqldump and mysql). It was just the login oddity. And at the time I never thought to remove temp/session stuff.
One thing I did learn. One of the tar files that held the backup turned out to be corrupted. So you really need to keep a rolling backup (or use several sets of media, I guess). This was only an evaluation site so no harm was done
Thanks, P.
Backup and restore
Disaster Recovery
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