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In short for the non-technical folks (like me):
A series of mis-fortunate events, all of which fall on my shoulders due to a simple back up.....
Between Christmas and New Years 2022 the server CSC resides on suffered an "event" that took out the forum section of the web-site.
Thinking this was a perfect opportunity to upgrade the forum software (what we are using today) I contracted VBulletin to upgrade and host the forum section of the site.
When upgrading the site it was discovered the backups I held were not complete and were missing some fundamental data (like the thread data and user data.....)
Once this was discovered too much time had passed to request an "emergency" back up from the server host and all the data pertaining to the back ups was lost.
Although the raw data was still there, it is not possible to convert that data into a format that could be uploaded to the upgraded forum.
The plan is to put the raw data we have into a searchable database for folks to search through.
The technical answer to what happened is as follows (for the technical folks, like our savior Bigshrimpin):
The site went down on 26th. At the same time, the host removed the version of PHP 7.1 needed for vbulletin to run.
We gathered the files and database from the server host to have vbulletin upgrade from 3.8.11 to 5.7.1 to host it on Vbulletin cloud.
Through that process we discovered the database was missing tables.
The Host couldn't restore the csc MySql database. Every existing backup of the database we had turned out to be incomplete.
The only glimmer of hope that exists is that every post all 176,172 are contained in a SQL table
A series of mis-fortunate events, all of which fall on my shoulders due to a simple back up.....
Between Christmas and New Years 2022 the server CSC resides on suffered an "event" that took out the forum section of the web-site.
Thinking this was a perfect opportunity to upgrade the forum software (what we are using today) I contracted VBulletin to upgrade and host the forum section of the site.
When upgrading the site it was discovered the backups I held were not complete and were missing some fundamental data (like the thread data and user data.....)
Once this was discovered too much time had passed to request an "emergency" back up from the server host and all the data pertaining to the back ups was lost.
Although the raw data was still there, it is not possible to convert that data into a format that could be uploaded to the upgraded forum.
The plan is to put the raw data we have into a searchable database for folks to search through.
The technical answer to what happened is as follows (for the technical folks, like our savior Bigshrimpin):
The site went down on 26th. At the same time, the host removed the version of PHP 7.1 needed for vbulletin to run.
We gathered the files and database from the server host to have vbulletin upgrade from 3.8.11 to 5.7.1 to host it on Vbulletin cloud.
Through that process we discovered the database was missing tables.
The Host couldn't restore the csc MySql database. Every existing backup of the database we had turned out to be incomplete.
The only glimmer of hope that exists is that every post all 176,172 are contained in a SQL table