handa wrote:My original account (same username) was among those that were deleted. I made a post to my log thread at the beginning of September and discovered that I couldn't log into my account or reset the password the first week of October.
This observation is important, since it pinpoints that the problem occurred in September or during the very first days of October 2024. So there is a gap between an old backup from May and the current database.
The data up to May could possibly be retreived with SQL select where you first make a list of all the accounts in May and and one valid now and run them together (they probably contain hidden number codes). Then those posts in the result that have missing fields from today are the one that have disappeared. Accounts that were made
after May, but before October can't be reconstructed with this method. The posts may actually still be there, but just without any member to refer to. In principle posts from rescued member IDs could potentially still be found, but you need to know the structure of the database to see whether that is possible. Actually, we do know that it mainly is the member list that is in trouble - even if all post of certain members had disappeared you would still see an empty member ID if it just was the list of posts that had been hit. The bad news is of course that the accident that hit the database may have hit both tables because of a command that connected them - and then the summer posts would be gone too.
With a list of lost accounts you can make a select on the table of posts and possibly others too (there may be index tables and things like that - plus tables tied to the PM system etc., but they are probably not important. The result should be one table with lost members and their data plus another with posts up to May for those members (or possibly up till now). And then those tables could be inserted into a copy (NOT the running system, please!!) of the current database to see what happens ... maybe the result is a database where the data can be accessed, but there may be additional tables that have something to do with security that prevents users from seeing them. Images may be lost: since they aren't accessible unless you are logged (a major itch BTW seen from my perspective since new users may think the whole system isn't working properly) they must be located somewhere outside the main database, and heaven knows what state those data are in or how they are connected to the posts that reference them.
