I'm sorry folks, but I tried to get them back.

Basically, it came down to

a) doing nothing and letting you folks fill the place up again
b) restoring back to Saturday's backup for all posts
c) writing a tool to reconstruct and merge posts from a different forum ... several week's worth of work at my current avaibility level.

Option A is easiest and the one we've decided to take after I discussed the issue with Brad.

Option B would lose approximately 150 posts from today and half way through yesterday, which would cause a lot of consternation.

Option C doesn't help you until maybe the end of October. By then, we'd be about 1/3rd the way through to the next 90 days worth of posts.

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Technical description:

The forum stores all the stuff in a database. The database is made up of various tables, such as forums, attachments, posts, members, and threads.

Although it was easy enough to select the right threads, and subsequently the right posts and attachments, it is simply not possible to merge them back into the running database as the ID number for each increments and cannot be set outside of doing a restore. This means each thread has to be re-created post by post, and attachment by attachment, plus I cannot give you the old TID, FID, or AID urls, so any links to any of the posts would not work.

However, as the Buying and Selling forums are transitory, the loss of all the threads, although really annoying is not the Apocalypse.

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Sorry for the data loss - the bug has been fixed, so it will not occur again.

Andrew

forum is still workin' so I'm happy:thumb