Solving your WordPress to WordPress XML Size problem

Yeah, I had the same problem that you are having right now and I also said one or two courses (ok, maybe more).

WordPress has this amazing tool for importing XML backups from another WordPress blogs but, there is a little issue: the backups are usually huge and the importer tool only lets you upload files that are below the 2MB mark.

So, what are you gonna do? Change your ini.php? That doesn’t work for most of us, hell, I don’t even know where that thing is so, here is how I managed to upload the backup in XML.

1-First things first: you must have an XML file.

2-Now you have to understand something, all your data is “packaged” (is that a word) in packs conteined in betwen of these tags <item>some data</item> so, what your are going to do is to separete those <item></item> tags.

3-First Step: you have to copy your XML file a lot of times (mine sized 8MB and I made 10 copies).

4-Now that you have the copies, you open the original file and search for </item>. Here’s the thing, there are a LOT of </item>s, so you keep searching ’til the bar goes down a little bit.

5-Select from the beggining of the file to the </item> you chose. Open a copy of the XML, select all the text and delete it, then you paste the selection copied from the original.

6-Go back to the original XML file and keep selectign from your “first” </item> selection to another one and go on until you’ve separete your XML in smaller pieces (these files must size under 2MB)

7-When you have all your small XML files, go to WordPress and import them one by one, a know it is a pain in the-you-know-what but that’s the easies way to do it.

I really hope that you understood my explanation, and I hope it works for you as it worked for me.