Restoring a site

[AustinBike]

Long story, but I have a Joomla 2.5.7 site that is running fine and stable. I have been backing up with Akeeba regularly.

I had not tested a backup in ages, not since I ran Windows (almost 2 years ago).

Today I tried to install Joomla on my NAS (installed with no problem, but only supports 3.0. When I installed kickstart and loaded the backup, it went fine. I can see the site and everything looks beautiful. Until you click on any link. Everything beyond the top page is a 404.

Thought it might be the NAS so I installed Joomla on a Mac server that I also have. Again it was 3.0. Unfortunately I see the exact same problem. The main page renders fine. At the bottom the links to more pages (featured articles) works, but when you click on any of the navigation or other content, it is a 404.

Is this most likely a 2.5.7 vs. 3.0 issue or is this most likely a broken database?

What is the best way to troubleshoot this issue?

I am a relative novice on Joomla and my site has been so rock solid I haven't bothered to learn a lot about the underpinnings because it was mostly a "set and forget" environment.

The actual live site is http://www.[removed]

[harperlala]

that site is joomla 2x and all links are ok. which bug do you talk?

[AustinBike]

That site is fine.

The problem is on the site that I am trying to restore locally in order to test my backup.

The front page works fine, but any content beyond that returns a 404 error.

I think this may be a result of the .htaccess file but I am not sure how to troubleshoot the problem.

[harperlala]

you can download .htaccess from your server and copy in your local:
https://docs.joomla.org/Preconfigured_htaccess

[AustinBike]

When I do that I get the following error:

mark('afterLoad') : null; // Instantiate the application. $app = JFactory::getApplication('site'); // Execute the application. $app->execute();

[AustinBike]

And when I remove the .htaccess the "base" site (a test php index) works again.

ultimately the .htaccess has the following:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^austinbike\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.austinbike.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Is this the proper context for this statement:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^austinbike\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://localhost/$1 [R=301,L]

If so, what should the second line be? Can't seem to get the right context.