Trouble transferring index and other files

Hi, I recently moved to a new hosting service. I transferred all the files via FTP but later learned that I had to create a database in order to get it to work. I did but it still didn't work, apaprently because my Omeka installation had somehow dropped the index along with a bunch of other files. I double checked with my old web hosting service and they said the files I had is all they had. So I downloaded Omeka again and uploaded the index from there along with other folders (except the ones I did have) to my Omeka installation. Now it's saying server error. I asked my hosting service to help and some of the tech people tell me to come here. I have no idea at this point what I'm doing wrong and it's difficult to search the forums since I don't know the terminology I should use because I don't know what the actual problem is. I've tried to explain above. I hope someone has an idea that may help. Thanks.

First, make sure you have an .htaccess file. This file gets lost during migrations because it is considered a "hidden file" by most operating systems (so you can't see it on your home computer by default). Without it, Omeka will usually fail. It's contents should look something like this (at least in Omeka 2.0+): Omeka .htaccess on Github.

db.ini contains your database connection so make sure you haven't deleted or overwritten it with your old file.

The files directory (or archive in older versions of Omeka) contains all your uploaded files, so you would want to avoid deleting those if you've already created some items

Your plugins and themes directories also contain stuff you might not want to delete or overwrite (obviously, they contain your plugins and themes respectively).

So, first make sure the above transferred fully (or in the case of db.ini, make sure it has the most current info).

Then, I would just re-upload all the rest of Omeka to make sure you're not missing any files, which would definitely cause an error.

Thanks, ebellempire. The hosting service tech support people walked me through some of what you mention here. Unfortunately, I kept several installations of Omeka and for some reason, even though the right one was showing with my previous hosting service, when I transferred, files got lost and I had to go to a previous installment to recover what I could. Some of the design coding I worked on may be lost. I'm going to check again and see if I can recover it. Thanks again.