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Entries missing in Database

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by shaunrozario 1 view

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Our company has a database of customers which can be marked out as paid customers, unpaid customers, active, inactive, etc..and this is accessed through the company website through php form in which there is a checkbox for the above options.

We were having no problems till monday. on tuesday morning when this database was accessed with the query of "paid customers" and "active customers", it returned a number 0 for both of them and eventually found out that all the list of paid and active customers were lost.

Dont know if anyone had played around it or something..and accidentally checked all of them as unpaid and inactive and saved the form.

The worst part was that there was no backups created between thursday and monday and that all our information which was entered is lost.

Is is possible to request a copy of the database to the hosting company dated 18th monday as i think most hosting companies does backups several times a day. and also will the backup give the details of all the entries till that day...

I am kinda lost ....would anyone have a suggestion.....???

3 replies

by shellbot

always always always back up man... i back up fully every evening, and transaction logs hourly...
but anyways..too late for that now..

1. Is your database hosted by an external hosting company? If so, contact them immediatly and explain. They probably do system backups, but as for just pure database backups, all depends on what you pay them to do. Hopefully you've paid them for backups. Now, if they can get this for you, and you restore to a copy of the 18th, you'r going to lose all data entered/changed from 19th & 20th, unless they are doing transaction log backups as well..

Actually, what database are you using? I'm guessing mySQL ? If so, I've never used it, so not entirely sure about it..

Another thing..
if the database is designed ok, chances are your data is not missing, its just hidden, so you may not need the backups if you don't have any.
Lets say in the table there is a feild called Inactive and it takes a 1 or 0, 1 being inactive, active being 0. Could be the case that its just been set to 1 and needs to be set back to 0. (howver, you might not know which ones need to be reset)
Most database don't delete data, they just supress it, so the query for the application would be pulling back data where Inactive=0.
Its still there, you just can't see it on the front end.

Let me know what you find out..

by tony hopkinson

the current transaction log (given it hasn't been truncated and get back to the point of the f'up.

That would be sql server, mysql, depends on what logging you/they have going.

It's extremely unlikely this is a database error though.

If you are hosted on a third party and this isn't in your SLA, get your cheque book out.

It would be interesting to see what did 'remove' the data. Personally I'd be looking for some sort of coding screw up, like an update statement with a bad where clause.

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