Mike,
Do all backups live with them as well? Could be better to restore an old db backup rather than start over. I'm happy to help if I can, I work in IT, (Cyber Security) but also have a web dev background.
While there are some very old off-site backups from earlier server migrations, there are no more recent off-site backups because they take considerable time to create (compress all files into either tar.gz or BZip2 format and dump the database) and even longer to download (due to lots of photos). Unfortunately, this time around they decided to perform a server migration without first notifying their customers. We learned about the migration at the same time many of our users and visitors did when our server was suddenly offline for an extended period of time and nobody could access it. Had we been given some advance notice — at least 24 hours — we would have invested the time and energy to make a current offline backup to have on hand should anything go terribly wrong in the migration.
We had a separate dedicated backup drive on the server they migrated us away from, but like so many other missing assets they did not bother to migrate over any of the backups (I’m not even sure we still have an actual “backup” drive, despite our paying for such, given how much of the server is off-limits to us at the moment — we do not presently have command line or FTP access at present). This has been about the second shoddiest migration I have ever experienced, only topped by a host that threw up their hands mid-migrations and decided to close their doors many years ago. Whatever they used to copy files over from one server to another clearly lacked any mechanism whatsoever to detect or correct incomplete or missing files and clearly just “assumed” that their mass file migration would be perfect and without defects, yet clearly many of the file copy attempts simply timed out due to limited bandwidth and those files were just dropped altogether. Due to their shear numbers and proportion of file data by size, it was predominantly photos that have been affected though some other files also appear to have been affected, they also appear to have overwritten some of our .htaccess files in the process.
The Board will have a lot to discuss at their next meeting, though I would really like to see us just take the plunge and finally migrate over to Xenforo which has been the plan for some time now and really needs to happen anyway. The database itself seems to be largely, if not entirely, intact, which is fortunate, so the losses seem to be relegated to the filesystem with mostly photos and attachments affected. They will likely also be hunting for a new host that can meet our site needs (this is actually a fairly busy site in traffic terms as we serve an international community even though we limit registration to a limited region). Given the recent options in Cloud backup solutions that have sprung up over the past few years since our last major overhaul of the website it would also be desirable to see if we can find a reasonably priced cloud backup solution that can be both configured and run from a Linux command-line so that we could maintain a backup that was both off-site and closer to near real-time to help fend off future insults like this recent debacle.
A lot will depend upon what they choose to do at their next meeting, though we will likely need several new skilled admins — especially with programming skills that can work well as a team and have free time to assist in such a migration as I do not have nearly as much free time as in years past and my health imposes some strict limits as well. I’ll help where I can and I am happy to provide guidance where others may need to handle things without me. I suspect those familiar with Xenforo would also be very valuable should we make that migration as my only experience with Xenforo has been from the user side of things (I know vBulletin just about inside out at this point, but Xenforo from an admin and programming perspective is all new ground).
