Moderator / Employee deletes attachments. How do I restore them?
 

Hello,

I had given moderator access to a full time employee with us. His name is <REMOVED>. Due to non performance, he resigned ( we asked him to )

He was paid in full for his services and I also connected him with a few recruiters that I knew.

I had forgotten to revoke his moderator privileges.

Looks like he wanted a leave a bad taste. Just recently, he logged into our forum and deleted some really important threads and attachments from our forum.

I can successfully restore the threads but I am unable to restore the attachments. How do I go about doing that?

All help will be highly appreciated.

The only way would be to restore them from an old backup.

okay, how do I go about restoring it from an old backup? My attachments are stored in filesystem and not in database.

Would appreciate all the help I can get.

--------------- Added [DATE]1443104824[/DATE] at [TIME]1443104824[/TIME] ---------------

Also it shows

and the thread was soft deleted. I guess that means he did not have the permissions to permanently delete the thread or delete the attachments. He just edited them out by removing them from the thread?

Maybe the attachments are still there and I can revert it without having to look into the backups?

If threads are soft deleted, you should be able to restore them with the normal moderation tools on your forum. Just like how you recover soft deleted posts.

You can go to "AdminCP > Attachments > Search" to find out if the attachments were deleted or not.

Thanks dave,

I have restored the threads.

But how do I find out which attachment file is related to which thread? Unable to figure out what attachments were edited from the relevant post. Anyway to find it and restore?

Hmm that's going to be tricky. The attachments don't show up in the posts in the thread right?

If there's no link between the attachments and the posts/threads anymore, I don't think it's possible to restore it without making use of an older backup.

Can the moderator log id not help in recovering it?

http://clip2net.com/clip/m467355/60137-clip-93kb.png

Screenshot : http://clip2net.com/s/3nW41fa

No, that's just the ID for the moderation action.
It looks like the attachment has really been removed off the server.

The only way to confirm that they are really removed is to look at the attachments (see previous post) and see if you can or can not find one that should exist.

Okay this sucks :(

I'm unable to get a staging site up from old database. Would've managed to download and restore attachments from there. My employee edited some 150 + posts. What a psycho!

While we all can side with you in the Human Condition aspect of things, none of us here know if this is true or just one-sided so with that being said I've removed the persons actual name from your first post, thjis way you came to us with an issue and we will assist but we will not conform or deny this persons motives as we never knew them in the least and don't know what they may or may not have been thinking at the time.

I've had others in the past who were not aware that their host ran some form of backups... who is your host and have you went to them regarding this asking if they run any form of backups on the files themselves? Usually it's a total backup of everything all folders, files, and databases plus other pertinent account related data so be sure to ask!