I am not sure how this happened yet but.... I hired someone on guru . com to make a template for my forums and I paid him 1/2 down. He made the template then went to install it and I wake up and it is installed but my database has been wiped out. No clue how this guy would even touch my database but it happened. I checked the database in my admin and looked through it and it is all gone, set back to default when you first install forums. Now of course I didnt make a backup because I didnt think this dude would be this stupid. First off this guy isnt going to receive the other 1/2 of the payment and I want the first 1/2 back. But is there anything I can do about losing all these threads and posts? This is what I need the most, basically he ruined my site completely.
Contact your host and see if they have a backup of the site, they should at least take weekly and monthly backups. Of course, there is also the case of if they can be bothered. But contact them ASAP incase they overwrite the backups.
Thanks, I contacted them already and they said they are looking into it. Hopefully they can restore at least some of it.
...and you probably don't want to hear it right now, but take a friggin' backup next time. You called the guy stupid for wiping out your database, but it is YOUR database. You are responsible for it. How could you let someone tinker with your website before getting a backup of everything connected to it? I hope you've at least taken this lesson away from your experience. Good luck getting your backup. Maybe you'll get lucky and their last backup is only a day or two old.
I'm gonna have to agree...this is by far the easiest mistake to make, the most detrimental mistake you can make, and the most common mistake made by forum owners. On top of that, it's just so easy to prevent, or at least fix when something happens. The only place for you to turn now is your host, I hope they can help you out.
This is true, but in defense of our misfortuned friend, lack of backups is incredibly common even in large companies. I once did an Oracle gig at a multi-million dollar marketing company (to remain anonymous) where a backup of the database had *never* been taken. I pointed this out to the IT manager, but he didn't want pay the extra couple of hours to setup the jobs - "we use RAID 5, have redundant power supplies, yada yada yada - we don't need to do backups". Knowing this guy was an idiot, I installed a simple nightly backup anyway...it wouldn't allow a point-of-failure restore, but at least they could restore to the prior night. About a year later, this same guy called me out of the blue because a programmer had accidently overwritten several hundred thousand records a few days before, but nobody noticed the problem until today. Since I was archiving the backups over a 30 day window, I restored the data without a problem. He also green-lighted a full backup evaluation...surprise, surprise... One thing I've learned about protecting your databases - it's not the hardware and power you have to worry about, it's those damn programmers
Let all webmasters take warning from this mistake. You should backup your websites and associated databases on a regular basis. And, you should keep historical copies too. Often, a database gets corrupted but the corruption goes unnoticed for awhile. If you only have one backup copy, your copy is probably also corrupt. But, if you have a choice to go back a day, week, month or even a year, then there's an extremely good possibility that you will have a good copy of it. Unfortunately, most people wait until there is a disaster before they decide to start backing up their data. Don't be one of them.
Just got an email from hosting company. Ill sum it up it one sentance what they said. "YOUR SCREWED"!
I can hardly believe that...running regular backups almost seems like standard practice these days. If anything, if I were a host, I would do it just to keep myself out of trouble. What exactly did you ask them and what did they say?
Sorry to hear that, dude. It does sound very odd that they don't have ANY backups at all?!?!? Even a backup from a month ago would be better than nothing at all. I would seriously be looking at alternative hosting if I were you. It's really strange that they don't have anything. ... and good luck in the V7N contest.
My managed VPS provider (ServInt) does daily backups to a backup server. It makes me very secure. Although. I still do occasional full back-ups myself just in case.
If anyone cares, The person doing my install finally got back with me and they did backup the database so I am all good now. I have no clue how they did a backup without having access to my database though. But they did have FTP access, so I guess there is a way to do it from that.
Well if he had access to the ftp details he could have accessed the config file with information on database connection Good to see a happy ending
You can actually backup the PHPBB Database from the admin control panel too. It doesn't work for backing up modified databases, but if your forums were just using the default database and he had that kind of access it could have happened that way. Definately make backups before undertaking anything major. My provider makes daily backups, but then I do backups before all major changes and upgrades and then again when finished.
phpBB stores its database in mySQL. I backup all of my mySQL databases using this little shell script: #!/bin/sh date=`date -I` mysqldump --all-databases -p | gzip > backup-$date.sql.gz Code (markup):