So we had some old backups from when I moved the site into hostmonster…..The steps to recovery went something like this:

1. Resurrect old file server that had stopped working 7 months ago that you had been putting off fixing
2. Repair broken linux md software RAID array
3. Update server to modern linux patches
4. Write backup scripts for hostmonster to download daily to repaired server
5. Bother wife to go through photos from 2003-2008 while 4000 miles away to make room for your new daily backups (Bad idea)
6. Find out you had plenty of unallocated space to backup the data all along
7. Discover your mysql database backup is from a version of wordpress not available since 2007
8. Hit head against computer for several hours trying to make the database format work anyway
9. Discover there are old version of wordpress still available that you could install and then recovery your database into for possible additional export methods.
10. Guess and check which wordpress database schema version the mysql backup might have come from
11. Guess wrong
12. Guess again
13. Guess wrong
14. Guess again
15. Guess right!
16. Export posts and comments from old wordpress blog
17. Reinstall current wordpress version since you screwed up your install trying hammer your square database backups into the newer round database hole.
18. Import old content from your export file that you created
19. Tweak blog settings (again)
20. Delete old wordpress version
21. Delete old databases
21. Post about your joy!