Our ShopForum Database got corrupted. The good news is that we were able to restore it from tape backup. The bad news is that we lost about one day of posts.

Ugh. That's a bummer. Thanks for getting it back up so quickly!

Bill,
Did you randomly back up the files the other day? Or does it do it on an automatic basis? Or do you do it periodically?
Good think it was backed up!

It is automatically backed up 3 times a week.

Thanks for having a good backup. You guys, and this site rule. Glad it's back.

I do have a question though. Is the "archive" of the 1999 Tech help stuff still around, or did it get combined with the Tech help forum when you updated the site's software a while back. No biggie, I was just wondering.

Thanks.

I think that 3 backups a week is not a great plan, unless the database has a "transaction log". With your current plan, you run the risk of losing data, as we know. It seems to me that a database product called mysql is in use. This product might not have the transaction log so in the event of a crash, you lose anything newer than your last backup. There is no way to restore data from the log. To better protect the database, there should be more backups per week, say 7 or even 14. There is no real need to save them all; simply saving the latest 3 backups would be fine.
My databases, (I am a database administrator), get completely backed up daily and we ensure that our transaction log is fully protected. The log is also stored on completely different disks which isolates it from general database failures.
Crashes like the one you have can happen at any time, so we like to minimize the downtime and eliminate data loss if possible.