Moderator deleted 300 threads, help

[MiakaShi]

Hi,

Someone took over a moderator's account and mass-pruned an entire forum. I know I can't bring these back without restoring a backup. My question is, is there anyway to take only the threads that were deleted from that backup and add them to the existing one?

I live in Australia, but 99% of my board lives in the U.S. and there was an 8 hour time period where I was asleep and lots of new important posts were added, so I can't just use the old back up.

Any help would be appreciated.
Thank you,
Janelle

[Steve Machol]

There is no way to do this that I'm aware of. The threads are useless without the posts to go along with them.

[MiakaShi]

Well, I'd like to bring the posts within the threads too.

I read in another thread about restoring deleted posts that a person could restore a backup, and just redirect the board to use the backed up database. That seems like a good idea, except that I don't want to lose the new posts made between the backup and now. So I just wanted to know if I could restore a backup, but also keep the original database--or will restoring a backup overwrite all the original stuff?

I'm sorry if I'm not very clear, I don't really know that much about MySQL or how databases work or anything like that.

Thanks for your patience.

[Andreas]

Suggestion

[sql]
insert ignore into livedb.thread select * from backupdb.thread;
insert ignore into livedb.post select * from backupdb.post;
[/sql]

Never thried that, but theoretically this should get the threads & posts from the backupdb into the livedb (which are not already present).

Afterwards, you would have to rebuild a lot of counters (forum information, thead information, reindex the forums ...)

Edit:
Whoops! vb.com does not have [sql]. Pity

[ALcorn]

I have a similar problem: an admin removed the entire thread in place of one post. I have the full dump of the forum before this disaster. Maybe someone can explain me what exactly should I do in order to restore only this thread ?