Well, this isn’t such good news. The short of it is that I made a stupid mistake and just wiped out the last year’s worth of work on this site, all because I used a “>” instead of a “<” when restoring the site database. I hope you will bear with me as I rebuild, well, everything; since the database housed all of the forms, articles, links – all of the site content – I have to recreate it all from scratch. The good news is that this has not effected the Gallery.
I did backup the database before I got started and all I was trying to do was upgrade to the latest version of Joomla, the software that the site is running on. At some point something went wrong and I decided I would restore the site files from backup then restore the database from backup and leave things the way they were until I could commit more time to the upgrade. Unfortunately for me, instead of restoring the data from the backup file to the site database, I overwrote the database that had all of the site data in it with the blank database. If you ever need to restore a database, please be sure to use the correct “<” symbol; neglecting to do so can have disasterous results.