Hi @wtheory, I’m sorry you’re having trouble. It seems like that tutorial uses a MariaDB database. Can you confirm what exactly you have tried when trying to re-use your existing data? Which error exactly did you see?
Since I think all the workflow/credentials are held in the database I was wondering if it was possible to just backup the database and utilize that on a fresh install of n8n? Would that work? Please help!
Yes, you can in theory import data directly into a database. I don’t have a step-by-step description for MariaDB though I am afraid, but I did something similar a while back with Postgres over here: How to migrate from SQLite to PostgreSQL? - #5 by MutedJam. This post is very old though, so in addition to the different database system there also have been a few additional tables since which you’d need to account for. Also, make sure to copy the config file in your old .n8n directory as this would include the encryption key required to read your credentials.