It's me again with the problems... Well, the server that was running my forums unexpectedly stopped so we had our ISP reboot the server. When it came back online, everything seemed fine or so it seemed. The forums had this error where it could not access the database. So ran the query 'repair table' and it fixed the accessing the database and all seemed well. Now here's the kicker, 3 users had their accounts gone missing along with all their posts! As if they were deleted or something, BUT the "Last Post" thing shows their username as being the last person to reply yet the message from them is gone. Of course we only noticed this a few hours later (after some harsh emails) that some users were missing. haha So my question is, if I have a backup of the database from a week ago, is it possible to merge the old table with the current table and sort of put back all the old posts without erasing the newer ones? Just wondering... any ideas what went wrong, what I should have done, what I shouldn't have done? yes yes, now I have backup of the database every night instead of once a week now. Thanks

If you backup the same way as I do, then you must be using phpMyAdmin and creating *.SQL files or the backup feature of the threads.

In that case I personally would close the boards temporarily, backup the database, and then use Beyond Compare to check for the inconsistencies.

I really don't know if this is what you wanted to read but this is how I would do it.

Warm regards

Nikos

Thanks I'll try that. Will that just tell me the differences in the two files? Or can it actually merge the backup with the current one? I mean is this even possible? To merge two tables together? And have it combine the information that is not similar on both into one table?

It will tell you the differences between the old and the new file (the backups I mean).

Then you will be able to merge the files and save them by transferring data from the left to the right part of the screen (or vica versa).

Warm regards

Nikos

Merging two database backups is risky, though. Unless you know exactly what you're doing, you could wind up with inconsistent data in the database.

Yeah, it actually does...Hmm..perhaps just say oh well the server decided to purge and I guess some people weren't so lucky then...oh well.