augatti

Thanks Lorelle. I was determined to find a way to go backwards though. I found a solution, a rather ugly one process-wise, but very quick and effective to implement once I figured out how. This is how I did it:
1. In phpMyAdmin, made two copies of wp_posts – one named wp_posts_bak and the other wp_posts_new. (via the Operations tab)
2. Exported wp_posts_new in SQL format, not to a file but to the screen.
3. Selected the export “SQL” text and copied and pasted it into a Word document. (I hate using Word, but I needed the advanced Find and Replace capability)
4. Opened the Find and Replace dialog box in Word, and checked Use Wildcards (under “More”)
5. Find What = (\alt=”*\”)
6. Replace With = \1title\1
an explanation of why I did this is here:
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.os.ms-windows.apps.word-proc/msg/9aff369aaa446dd4?hl=en
7. The result was that
<img src=”/images/someimage.jpg”alt=”some text”/>
now looked like this
<img src=”/images/someimage.jpg”alt=”some text”titlealt=”some text”/>
8. I then did a find and replace of titlealt -> title
9. Selected the entire text of this modified Word document and copied it. NB on first run I saved the file, both on exporting and after modifying it in Word. This appeared to have corrupted the data. That’s why I then tried just moving the text around simply by copying and pasting it between apps.
10. Back in phpMyAdmin I dropped the wp_posts_new file.
11. Under the SQL tab, pasted the text into the Run SQL query box and ran it.
12. Checked the newly created wp_posts_new file – it looked okay.
13. Dropped the wp_posts table.
14. Copied the wp_posts_new table to wp_posts (via the Operations tab)
15. Tested my website – perfect. Made a note to delete the wp_posts_bak and wp_posts_new after a few weeks if everything is still fine.