I’ve been (slowly) designing a new WordPress site locally on my Windows 11 hard drive. I’ve been using Apache and MySQL via the XAMPP Control Panel.

I keep running into a situation in which MySQL unexpectedly shuts down. MySQL would run without much incident for a few days. But then it would again shut down unexpectedly. I troubleshooted the problem, tried changing the ports (as many people suggest), etc. But MySQL eventually wound up shutting down again.

Ultimately, I found the most effective way to resolve the MySQL continuing shutdowns, was to completely uninstall, then reinstall XAMPP, including MySQL. But now, I need step by step instructions on how to restore my WordPress site (database, themes and all files) from a local manual backup after XAMPP has been reinstalled.

My backup was made in File Explorer when I copied the entire XAMPP folder and all its contents (including the WordPress files) from the hard drive I’m using as a server to a separate drive. But just copying the WordPress files back to the server drive after reinstalling XAMPP doesn’t seem to restore the site.

Please tell me, step by step, how to restore from my hard drive my WordPress database, all related files and the WordPress theme I had been using.