Well it seems that MediaTemple won’t be able to give us any database backups, because they don’t have any to provide.

The lesson we have learned from this incidence: “Never ever trust the administration tools shipped with your blogs and forum apps” stick to your reliable old fashion tools such as command line interface. We lost our data because PHPBB3 backup and restore didn’t quite work! Perhaps they should spend more time improving those features, in the mean time I should have continued using more reliable methods of administration such as getting a straight mysqldump from the database myself.

So we are left with 2 options. We will clean up the mess and start with a clean forum all over again. Fortunately all the user accounts still seem to be there.

The other option would be an early deployment of Anahita Social Engine for Tazzu which will take 2-3 weeks. In fact, if we see that fixing PHPBB3 will be taking a way too much of our time and resources we would rather invest that into the deployment using the Anahita.