…and I’m not talking about weight. 
My familiarity with “BLOB” is very minimal (at best), but from what I do understand, it’s an approach MySQL was gifted with which enables it to store practically anything in a binary format. Is this accurate?
Anyway, I have a bunch of these guys in my database that need to be converted back into their original formats. Honestly, I think I’m hosed and if that’s the case, I’ll survive, but it would be splendid if there was some sort of script that some of you may know of that can do this conversion for me.
Does anyone know of a script that can take BLOB content and re-convert it back to whatever original formats the information may have been in?
With a blob, what you put in is what you get out. No conversion is performed. So, it’s already in the proper format.
So, what are they supposed to be? For example, images, pdf, text? What do you want to do with them? For example, save to a file with the proper file extension?
Well, the majority of files consists of Word and PDF files. I think there’s probably some images here-and-there, but the majority are the Word and PDF files.
You see, what’s happened here is related to the use of the Joomla “Remository” component. We ended up converting an older version of Joomla over to a newer version and when we did this, we also upgraded the Remository component. We thought everything was working alright since the files were “showing up” in the downloads list, but, funny enough, when we went to download the files and open a few up, they were empty files! Ha.
So obviously, I dropped the ball with the migration process somewhere along the lines, but with all the steps some of that Joomla stuff requires, it’s bound to happen (especially when some of the documents are poorly written).
Anyway, I just hoped there was an easy way to take the BLOBS from the database (assuming that these BLOBS are the actual content of the files themselves) and re-convert them.