I have just lost my entire database.

10 MONTHS and over 9,200 articles.

WTF!!!!

I was creating some new subcategories and duplicating articles into those subcategories.

I tried to create a 3rd level of subcategories which didn't work.
I had categories>restaurant recipes and sub categories
category>restaurant recipes>#
category>restaurant recipes>A
category>restaurant recipes>B
With another category under the alpha, which was the restaurant name.

Not only did it not work, but the subcategories A,B, etc stopped showing up on the user side of the site.

I tried Update Module to get it to work.

Nothing worked so I was busy moving the sub>sub categories back into the sub categories (restaurant recipes).

Then I noticed that the commands 'Read permissions' (both were checked) and 'Articles submission permissions' (Registered Users was checked) suddenly were blank.

I started checking them again, while I was moving the subdirectories back.

Suddenly, ALL MY ARTICLES DISAPPEARED!!!! Every article I've published in ALL categories are gone

10 Months work, and over 9,200 articles.

I checked my MySQL database and it's empty.

I have been cut n pasting my old html site into smartsection, as well as doing daily updates. As a result of this, not only have I lost the past 10 months of cut n paste efforts, but I did not keep the old html pages. So in efect, I have lost 10 years work.

What the HELL happened??????

Before running into panic, reply to this question:

Is your site in a shared host?

If the reply is "yes", ask your host for their backups. Perhaps they can restore the database from a weekly or daily backup.

Also backups on a regular basis are your friend and a responsibility as a webmaster. See this article on my site for more:

Regular Database Backup with Cron

by chefry on 2007/11/11 15:24:32

First question, Is your register with tucows? -- If so, I will step you through it, if not someone else can take over.

BS

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They do backup daily, and they did a restore from the day before, but something went wrong and it more than doubled the size of my site.

Nobody can figure out why.

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I don't really feel like a lecture right now
But thanks for the advice

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What does tucows have to do anything? They host software not my website

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Anyway, this is good news.

Do a backup of your entire site as it's now (via FTP) and the database (using PHPMyAdmin). When you're sure you have everything you need, you can do two things:

· Manually check the downloaded content, to see why is it double the expected size.

· Delete the whole site and restore it from their backup. MAKE SURE YOU DID YOUR OWN BACKUP PROPERLY. This way you'll be pretty sure the only files that appear in your site are those form the backup.

Keep us informed. Good luck.

On the issue of backups, I recommend phpmysqlbackup which you can get from here and from several other shareware sites. It's free.

You can run the script manually, but it's best run automatically via cron, so you need to see if your host provides that feature. If they do, you can run the script every day and it will backup your database, gzip it and email the file to you!. In my experience, for a moderate size website the email attachment is typically under a megabyte.

I currently use ftpsync to backup the site files, although I plan to try SiteVault next year, which combines database and file backups in one application.

Tucows are also a large domain-name registrar.

Make a backup of the restored database and use it on a WAMP/XAMPP testserver so you can check locally why your database has doubled.
Probably your hoster added their backup to your existing database without dropping the tables first. The best is to sort this out on a local testserver. It might result in a minimum loss of your websites content.

A pretty good backup module is XOOPS DB Backup & Restore. It can backup each table seperately and if you like it can sent the backup to an email address too. Also each table can be restore separately.