I have on a couple of occasions experienced corruption of the board's msg file when it has suddenly become zero bytes in size and all posts have been lost. I have had to rebuild the msg file starting from a backup, tacking at the end of it in textpad new posts and then doing "rebuild all boards". This works ok, the problem is storing the thread topic title ONLY in the board's msg file is a real issue, because this file seems very vulnerable to corruption. The thread topic title should in my opinion also (or only) be stored in the txt file associated with the msg.

You can see now I have got a read-only archive board but all the latest messages in it are new threads created since my last backup - their titles are all RECOVERED.

http://www.thefishy.co.uk/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?

I backup up everything more often now!

Could it be that your server package is running out of space? This is a common problem when files mysteriously reduce to 0 bytes or are deleted. Check to see how much space you have left on your hosting account.

Quoted from pcmantinker

Could it be that your server package is running out of space? This is a common problem when files mysteriously reduce to 0 bytes or are deleted. Check to see how much space you have left on your hosting account.

I don't think so. There is no quota on my hosting account and I've been able to happily carry on using it afterwards once the msg file is rebuilt without deleting any files.

99% of the time it's a server related issue.

The reason why I never added thread titles was because of extra junk.  I'll add it to my list though and think about adding it.