How am I going to solve this (message board disaster related)
 

To put it quickly, a renegade mod deleted two massive topics after a certain user asked for his content to be removed, and this user had posted the first two posts. Nothing else was effected, because he was demoted quickly, and I have a backup. However, the backup is encrypted and in tar file format, and these others members who posted in these two topics want their posts back in the replacement topics while the member that created them doesn't want his posts back. And the backup is a few days old, so I need to import some of the content.

How am I going to do this? How am I going to be able to get the posts for these members (about 3000 in all from these topics) while removing the posts from the post creator and not changing the rest of the forum. Should I use a test vb version of the board to upload the backup and then use the forum moderation tools to remove the rogue posts and then import the data to the current main forum with Impex? Any ideas?

You simply tell your members that the threads were deleted because of Mod X, and because of Poster Y... so if they have to complaint, contact them directly with their emails listed below...

imagine the result, nobody will ever ask to delete posts anymore.

But now they're trying to find and repost every single post since about January in said topics, which is gonna take even longer...

bah, let them, i'm sure some of them have a lot of fun... lol

it's hard to recover secured content...

Maybe its time to only allow soft-deletion?

Send your members to the google cache of the threads and let them repost the best posts if they want.

I would do it how you suggested - import into a seperate vB, remove all other posts, users (with the exception of the users who posted in these threads) and groups e.t.c. and then use Impex to import.

On a site point, you are under no obligation to remove the posts - personally I don't remove any posts unless they are of an illegal nature.

You could probably get away with just copying the mysql rows over from the thread & post table. (I know were not supposed to advise that but since you're a coder you could probably solve any problems you encounter).