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I am very sorry to bring a rather nebulous question here but need any and all help I can get: for the first time, I've had a "White Screen of Death" issue when trying to update a module. I believe it was the "Metadata" module but I don't even remember for sure. I had a previous backup of the database and site files/folders from a day ago, so I didn't make one this time. Followed the Drupal tool for downloading, installing, and...presto....White Screen of Death.

Trying not to panic, I reverted to the older backup. Which I hoped would solve the issue.

Yet it did not.

So my question is whether perhaps (fingers crossed!) there's additional steps I need to take once a backup is in place to get things working again. I tried truncating every "cache_..." line via PhpMyAdmin, but it didn't help. I tried the "update.php" in the URL hoping it was (maybe) just an index.php issue. Again...no dice.

I've seen a long page about WSOD possible issues but don't want to just muddle around doing that if I don't know what I'm doing, which I don't.

Are there any suggestions for quick, simple things I've either forgotten or could try to get this working again? And if I can't, can I manually copy files and folders over somehow and try again?

Thank you all in advance for any help. I really appreciate it. Stay healthy out there!

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    When you restore the DB and the sites/files folder, this does not restore your old code base. You also need to restore to the old code base / module versions to turn your backup into a running site.
    – Hudri
    Commented Apr 1, 2020 at 16:08
  • Hi Hudri. I replaced (via my ISP) the entire root directory and all subfolders, and the database. I didn't just swap out the sites/files. (Though maybe I should double check that they recursively backed up the folder...if they only did the top root directory that would definitely explain things!) Thank you! :-)
    – user1149499
    Commented Apr 2, 2020 at 1:22

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So the solution here was that the backup (done by my ISP) did not fully restore. I think they forgot to recursively restore and just did the main Drupal root. Once I asked them if they were sure they restored recursively and there was a long pause (a few hours, at which point the site started working again) they came back and said they'd missed a few files.

So luckily that solved it. I did not need to configure anything or run any update.php or such. Just restored the entire Drupal directory and all subdirs and such, and a database restore to match. That fixed it. Whew!

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