Sorry forgot about this thread. Here's the link to the article that describes incorrectly attached attachments.

http://experienced-people.net/forums...chment-Problem


This becomes a problem due to the bug in versions pre 4.2.3 as described here. You'll need to be logged into vb.com to see the issue in the tracker. Basically invalid attachments were not deleted, so looked valid, but once you upgraded to 4.2.3 all those invalid attachments that had not been deleted all of a sudden get deleted in one fell swoop and it looks like you lost a tonne of attachments.

thanks for additional info. I will monitor this for future upgrade, thankfully i always do backups.

A bump, but maybe a clue for people converting.
I lost over 9000 attachments due to this, only the last 35 or so attachments were present. And actually I think it is a bug in the upgrade script. I upgraded from 3.8.9 to 4.2.3.
Some time later all my attachments were gone.

So, I did a new upgrade andpayed attention to the two known tables.
What I noticed that for all attachments but the last couple, the fields for height width and refcount had no value or "0" actually.
So, it seems to me that not all records are updated correctly in the upgrade process.
EDIT: Reason for this opinion: For the records missing the Refcount data, also the height and width fields contained no data, wehre the ones that did have a Refcount, also had a value in this field.

For who is planning an upgrade:
For this problem you can just go ahead. But disable the "Hourly Cleanup 2" first thing after the upgrade, and do not run update counters. Set the refcount to 1 as described here: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=320246

Then you can enable the disabled task again. And do all other things you have to do after the upgrade.

My only comment on this is that it isn't anything in the upgrade script for 4.2.3 since that script does not touch the filedata table. The data is already corrupt in the table before the upgrade, it's just that the upgrade actually reveals the problem because filedata is actually being deleted.

Actually at this point I'd just hold out for a bit until 4.2.4 is released as it fixes the issue with corrupt refcounts in the filedata table.

In that case I am curious what does make the tabel, because it isn't in my 3.8.8 database....
Anyway, whatever creates or updates that database, does not set all refcounts and width and height fields, but in my case only the last 34. And I am able to reprodues that over and over again by upgrading the database from 3.8.8 to 4.2.3
This because vB support just told me that doing the upgrade again would fix my problem, not telling that the Refcount and cleanup job were the actual problem.

Lets hope it fixes the missing height and width fields as well, because, then though I have my attachments back, they do not show up in the messages itself, due to the missing height and width data. vB support confirmed that the missing height and width data is the cause of that problem. Unfortunately they were not able to supply a fix for it. :mad:

Some comment and info with regards to this issue. Exactly the same happened to me.

I did the 3.8.9 upgrade to 4.2.3, everything looked good. The next month I realised all the attachments were gone. The physical attachments were still on the drive, but the filedata table was empty. This to me confirms the problem is in one of the cleanup scripts and not in the actual upgrade script.

Luckily I did a database dump directly after the 4.2.3 upgrade before I started fiddling with any addons or mods. I looked at this db and the filedata table was there with all the attachment entries.

We extracted that one table, updated the refcount field which was zero for all entries to 1, then we imported this one table back into the live system and this brough back all the attachments.

So if there is anybody out there suffering the same problem, you could try a similar process. If you do not have a backup of after the upgrade you will have to run another upgrade on your v3 database. Once the upgrade is completed look at the new filedata table, if the attachment entries are there you need to first update all line items and change refcount from 0 to 1.

Then you need to go back to your live forum and dump all those entries to a sql file just incase.

From the fresh upgrade dump only the filedata table. Now you have to merge this into your existing live system, make sure not to go and delete any new entries that is there.

Hope this helps somebody out there, I lost far too many hours with this after the upgrade.