Okay, first let me say that the forum crumble has nothing to do with eblah, my hosting provider had a hardware failure that caused the user database to become corrupt. I, as admin along with other users, were unable to login, retrieve passwords, or even be recognized as registered users.

With that said, my hosting provider restored a backup of the forums that, for some strange reason, turns out to be from May 31st. This leaves about 20 days of forum activity lost.

I currently have access to the corrupted version of the forum and would like to know if there is a procedure that would allow me to merge the boards and messages with the older version of the forum. In essence taking the good parts from the two versions and bringing them together. This would salvage a lot of posts and information. The number of users that actually registered between May 31st and today is minor, so having them re-register isn't much of an issue.

The other concern, as I see it, is having posts integrated with the older copy that are from non-registered users. I'm not sure how this would effect the operation of the forum or if, in itself, would cause issues.

So, before I embark on a journey that might very well destroy the forums completely, I wanted to get some input.

There's no easy way of doing this if at all. Do you not have your own backup?

If you want me to take a look then pm me ftp login details.

No, I didn't see the need. I've learned not to place so much trust in my hosting provider and will be making my own backups from now on.

I may be able to repair your old forum if you still have access to it.

Martin, I do have access to the old files. But, the exact same problem has happened again. So, for the moment, I'm waiting on the tech support to resolve the issue. I think there' more going on here than just a random hardware failure. But, until this issue is resolved, I'll hold off on taking you up on your offer to give fixing the old files a try.

This has been one very strange day...

I suppose, in some ways, that it's a good thing that this happened. In the very least, it's an excellent example of why the forum should be backed up, using the built in backup function, on a regular basis.

The exact same thing happened again about a week ago, but this time, I had the forum backed up and minimal data was lost. So, if you read this post, then I highly recommend using the backup function.

And, thanks go to the programmers for having such a wonderful feature built in. I'm now on a daily backup routine.