POOF! There goes 700 members

My site is a little over 5 months, and got up to 700 members. I created a testing profile yesterday, and when I was done, I used the link in ibdw 3col to delete the account. Then, when I logged back into my admin profile, it took me BACK to the last page I was on, the delete profile page. I though I was still under my test account, and deleted my own account! Normally I wouldnt worry, but the day before I had deleted the backups because I was creating a new one, that's a different story. Well, I DID find an old backup and imported my profile, except for one small problem.

There's one line I didn't see before I imported:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `Profiles`;

I deleted over 720 members in 1 second!

Back to the drawing board!

:) So what do you need now? Restore?

There was nothing I could do, I didn't have a backup, and after HOURS of googling, I learned there was nothing I could do to restore it without backup. Luckily I found an OLD backup that had the first 100 members, but there was ALOT of work getting that many members.

Wow - way sad.  I have been doing some research, and have come to the conclusion that there are very few successful sites on Dolphin  - 700 would have been one of the bigger ones here.    Your hosting company doesn't do a site backup do they?  All I can think is to go through your confirm emails and see what you can reconstruct.   Sometimes, disasters have a hidden benefit, but it is hard to find that in this one.

Sorry to hear that man :(

I had a similar situation when I was at 300 members, luckily I had just converted from phpbb3 so I still had that database to work with (had to convert the profile fields again and lost all uploaded content, but better than nothing!).

I have since implemented a mysql backup script from here: http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/automatic-mysql-backup-script/. Works pretty slick, set the parameters in the php file and set up a cron job if you'd like to make them recurring.

I had it run the backup daily, and set up a cron job to delete anything more than 30 days old in the backup files. When I hit 1,000 members, I kicked off another job to run every two hours just in case I needed to recover anything from that frequency. Just climbing over 1,200 members now, I think I will adjust the frequency to hourly once we hit 1,500.

Almost forgot, you can set up e-mail alerts on backup success and failures too, which is a great indication that everything is running ok if you don't get full visibility into your site every day.

And the moral of the story is: always have automatic backups.

If your with a hosting provider see if they have a bu of your db and yes you should perform routine backups of your db and site for that matter. Good luck...

you deleted your own account and that was the reason to restore to the old DB.?.. why didn't you just create a new account

have you contacted you host provider to see if they have any backups they could restore?

I have a VPS with Godaddy, and they only backup if it's an option you paid for, which I didn't. I got 25 singups today, so people are coming back, plus more. I've been running an ad on Craigslist in my niche, and have been getting around 200 hits a day from 3 or 4 ads a day. Seems to be a good way for free traffic.