On December 3, 2013 a server crash wiped out our database, destroying all forums, topics, posts, and user accounts. With no backups were available due to extremely unfortunate timing, we had to start over from scratch. It was a sad, said day.
Earlier this month I stumbled upon a local copy of the database prior to the crash that I had used for testing purposes. It was about a year out of date from when the crash happened, but that's still about 8 years of posts I could recover, dating from all the way back in 2004 when the forums were first started.
At the time of the crash we were using older versions of PHP, Apache, and phpBB, so I had to downgrade PHP and Apache and install phpBB 3.0.12, the version that we were using at that time in order get the restored forums up-to-date. Once that was done I had another decision to make, do I upload it as a simple archive or do I try merging it with the existing forums?
After doing some research, it seemed like merging the forums would be nearly impossible... but I wanted to do it anyway and was able to find someone else who was actually able to accomplish this with phpBB 3.0 and wrote some general instructions on how they did it. Someone else put those instructions into a PHP script which gave me a great starting point.
I took that script, made several modifications to fix bugs and make it compatible with phpBB 3.2 forums, and after a couple frustrating days was able to get a successful merge. I then spent several more days getting the merged forums all set up and ready for use. And so on August 31, 2013, we have restoration!Note: To make the merging a bit easier, I deleted all user accounts registered after the database crash that had zero posts. User accounts that had the same name and email address as user accounts in the backup have been merged into single accounts.
