I purposefully accidentally deleted one of my folders in the root of my Joomla 1.7.3 folder.  It was mostly an experiment to see if I could recover my website simply by restoring the folder from the installation zip file.   Why? Dunno. because I had nothing better to do?

What I did:

1. I ssh/telnet’ed into my Joomla 1.7.3 website
2. Cd into my website domain directory
3. Deleted the whole includes folder
4. Refreshed my Joomla 1.7 website

To my surprise my website produced an error message indicating that the index.php was expecting the includes folder but could not locate it.   How did I fix it? Simply by uploading the same folder from a downloaded version of the Joomla 1.7.3  zip file.

Steps to restore Folder:

1. Go to Joomla.org, click on Download
2. Download ZIP file of latest version of Joomla
3. UNZIP  file on computer, locate the includes folder
4. Use Filezilla to upload the directory back to the Original location in my Joomla directory
5. Refreshed Joomla 1.7.3 website in the frontend. Guess what!! It worked. My website is back to normal. Will try again with other directories if I get  bored again.

Thanks,

Elaine