Hello again,

I’ve been working at the forum again. The terribly bad news is that we have lost our data. The good news is that at least I know what happened. Here is what went wrong:

When I used the feature Maintenance > Backup in the PHPBB3 apparently the php-execution-time timed out and not all of the databse was backed up. Later I have found out that the backup file is only 16.9 MB instead of 53 MB that PHPBB3 was reporting.

So after setting up the forum I realized that many posts have simply vanished.

The mistake I’ve made was that I trused PHPBB3s backup, normally I would have done a straight databasedump directly from the databse or using phpMyAdmin, but this time I had the impression that “nice, phpbb3 has provided all my maintenance tools to me!”

and not to shift the blame to the phpbb3 directly, having known that Maintenance > Backup could fail like this, I would have increased the php execution time on the MediaTemple account and then would have created a backup.

The only sensible option left is to purge the past data and start again. One issue will be user’s who have a high post count, in that case I’ll see if I can preserve everyone’s post counts or bump all the members with high post counts to chartered members.

At the end, we can’t wait to migrate Tazzu to the Anahita Social Engine ™ platform. It is much more managable code with actual discussion boards and groups that allow you create your own groups, and tag your topics as you go.

I’ll continue working on cleaning up the mess during the weekend and yes upgrading the phpBB3 code since we will be still using it for at least another 2-3 months.

You can follow the conversation on the PHPBB3 forums here