Alright I have no idea how I managed to do this but here's my current situation. I've been experimenting with dotnetnuke for about 2 months now. I have a working site and have a bunch of data on it. So today I was experimenting with backing up and restoring the site to a completely new server. I was attempting to modify the portalaliases table when I noticed that I don't have one. Not only do I not have one but more to the fact that the database is completely empty, there's nothing in it whatsoever. So I looked at my web.config file and noticed I'd misspelled the server name in the SQL connections string. There are an mdf and an ldf in the virtual directory and I assume those are where everything is, my question is how could this have possibly worked? If the SQL connection string was pointing to a completely different server (one that actually is no longer on the network at all) how have I gotten this far? There are 2 completely different MDF and LDF files, one having the proper database name the others being called database.mdf and database.ldf. More importantly how do I fix this.

So it's 100% normal for the database I created to be completely empty and all the data to be in this application created database? Seems kind of pointless to require you to create a database if it's not going to be used doesn't it?