Restore database backup to new installation without the .env file

Hey!

This is my first post in here.
I’d like to say that I really love Invoice Ninja, I searched for a long time and tested lots of solutions before I found Invoice Ninja which fulfilled all my companys needs.

To the question that I have.
We (my company) recently lost our on-site server which we also had our installation of Invoice Ninja on.
We had performed backups every single day on the MariaDB-database so that’s no problem at all.
We’re now in the works of setting up our new installation of Invoice Ninja on our new VPS, however there seems to be a problem with restoring our data to this new installation.
As I said, we do have backups of the database, but from what I’ve seen in different forum posts here is that you HAVE to have the .env file. This file is nothing that we have. What exactly is it that is so important with this .env file that this can make or brake a try to restore our database?
We have obviously tried to import the database backup to our database in the now existing MariaDB-server but the only thing that happens is that we’re greeted with “Whoops, looks like something went wrong.”
I know when we installed IN (Invoice Ninja) from the beginning we were very thorough with the backups, that it was made every single day. We read several forums and how-to’s so that we would know exactly what we should run backups on. Not one single line were written about needing the .env file backed up as well. Not one single mentioning of any other file at all except for the database backup.

Is there any hope for us on restoring our database and actually being able to continue with our data that we do have, or do we need to start over all from the beginning again?

If there is any logs or anything that you need from me to be able to know if we can restore our data in any way please don’t hesitate. We will do everything in our power to get our database to be restored, if there is any possibility to do this.

Best Regards
Henrik Andersson
Destnet Computer & Webservices
Destnet Cloud Services

Are there any details about the error in storage/logs/laravel-error.log

The APP_KEY is stored in the .env file which is needed to decrypt the payment gateway and bank account configs.

Actually I sat and fiddled with the installations and the database backup last night and somehow I got it to actually work, without the original .env file. How is that really possible, since you’re supposed to need the APP_KEY that is stored in the .env file like you wrrote Hillel Coren. This is kind of weird, isn’t it ? I mean we didn’t have any backups of our old installation at all.

Well well, the most important thing for us at the moment is that it works.
Although thinking about it from the point of view of security people this isn’t so good that you actually could use only an database backup to restore an entire company database and every other setting and bank information and stuff.

If you have existing payment gateways from before are you able to edit them?