Will I Lose My Work If I Re-Install?

At times you might have problems with your Joomla, such as certain functionalities not functioning as they should. When that happens, you might be tempted to simply re-install Joomla.

The wonderful Joomla logo!

If that is the case, keep in mind that while this may fix the problems you encounter concerning the functionalities, this will also result in you losing any work you have done upto that point. Thus, instead of re-installing, give the below a try:

- Change your template to the default template to see if this changes anything. Many problems encountered are the result of faults in templates.

- Upload the Joomla files to your site to write over the old files. Sometimes there are corrupted files and everything could be fixed if you can replace that corrupted file with an uncorrupted version. But since you won't be able to determine which is the corrupted file (well, at least not the common user), you'll need to overwrite all of the files. However, do not FTP the installation folder. This will only affect the original Joomla files and will not touch any files that came with other packages (e.g. templates installed after installation will not disappear).

The fastest way to carry out the action presented above is to get your Joomla setup zip, take out the installation folder from it, upload the zip to your site and then extract the folder. This can all be done from cPanel, which I'm sure almost everyone has some familiarity with by now.