The vBulletin team did the best they could to restore the data, so I am told. They have told me the data is gone. But I kind of suspect that what they are saying is they don't know how to get to this data. I supplied a backup which was about 1 year old, which had some of the table structure information in it. They said that would help. After they used this, they could get back some of the forums. However, I get the feeling that when they used that, it may have deleted the other forum info. Anyway, they inform me they cannot recover anymore.
Currently, I have installed phpMyAdmin and am trying to download the data and structure. However, it is not letting me so I will get onto technical support. The site uses a host that has been around for ages, since the forum was set up a very long time ago. This host does not have the typical cpanel you normally get and it has very limited features. I left it there due to the fear of losing forum information when transferring to another host. But their facilities seem to me - especially after what happened - to be inadequate. For a start, I would have thought they would have had more than a one day backup. Is it normal for a hosting account to just back up for one day? My lack of backups was due to it pushing my traffic levels into a prohibitive costing bracket for the hosting and also the need to send elivated support tickets to the people concerned just to do a backup. The traffic caused by downloading the nearly 2 gig of data would have pushed me into the next tier up hosting bracket which was 5 times more expensive, believe it or not.
Anyway, it would be a pity to see you go Pat. In a way, it is like the "terrorist" who did this is getting their way, which is to ruin these forums. That would be a crying shame.
My intentions are to:
1. Upgrade to the latest and most secure version of vBulletin.
2. Restore all the orginal forum sections (even if we can't get the data).
3. Restore moderator privaledges but ask that all passwords are changed.
4. Make a backup of the latest posts and structure.
5. Find a better host (maybe a dedicated server?) that will give me cpanel, phpMyAdmin and other features, so that the administration of these forums is far easier.
I'm hoping for continued support with these forums. It is such a shame that someone has tried to spoil them but I will do my best to get them back up and running again.