Stamping out fires

The upgrade was a major task and we have and still are experiencing some issues. The main issue that will not be resolved is the loss of about two weeks data. I am very sorry about that loss and in the short term many of you will be affected one way or another. I had many versions of the the database and may have dumped and installed the wrong one. As I had many other issues to resolve at the time I didn't notice the missing data until it was too late to do anything about it.

Let me attempt to explain how the day of the upgrade went.
I awoke early Sunday morning full of energy and ready for the challenges ahead. Over the previous couple of weeks I had dumped converted and tested the data numerous time and I felt that this was the day.
Everything was on my laptop and the first issues of the day were network problems trying to get my laptop networked with my home network. This I have done before without problems but on this morning I took about 3 hours to get that simple task done. Luckily I am bald or I would have been losing hair.

Once I was finally networked I locked the old forum system and uploaded a simple holding index page for the site. I then started the long process of converting the data from the old forums to the new. To be safe I made the conversion to my laptop instead of straight to the server. That took most of the day. While that was happening I set up all the new Drupal system files in a new directory on the server and set up the database for Drupal.

Then I made dumps of all the separate tables and inserted them into the new database on the server. Dumping the whole of the database was out of the question due to the size. Although this took a long time everything was working as expected at this stage on my laptop. I started testing on the server in the evening and came across multiple issues where data was out of sync. By about 9pm I should have been ready to go live but was still trying to sort out some major issues. I made clean dumps of tables that I thought were causing problems all the time testing configuring and testing again.

By about 3am I was still having issues mainly to do with access to data. As I wasn't getting anywhere I went to bed.

6am I woke and got stuck into it again and managed to get most issues sorted in about half an hour. I then had to add all the old pages to the new system, move the system files to the root directory and get to work.

Somewhere in that process I lost a couple of weeks, they are gone forever.
It could have been caused by errors in the database conversion or me using the wrong dump files. Sorry to anyone that joined or posted in the last couple of weeks. I'm not going through that process again. In a few months this will all just be water under the bridge.