I REALLY need help! I hope someone will be able to take a look at my admin area and see if you can identify my problem. Here's what happened.

We have an installation of links 2.0 that we've been running on this site (justfriends.com/links) for about 2 years. No problems ever. Last week, the owner tried to change some category names, and suddenly the ENTIRE links database was gone. I think there were about 10 links out of over 1000 that survived.

I went looking for the cause and discovered that we'd filled the disk allotment for his account, but upgraded and got more disk space, then installed a backup (which only contained 535 links as it was older) and it all seemed fine. I never did discover the actual cause, unless it was related to maxing out the disk.

Next, the owner tried to go in and start adding back sites that had been lost. That is ALL he did. When he tried to build, everything was gone again, including all the subcategories. Once again I discovered a disk full error when I made attempts to fix this new problem. I've talked to the techs and they assure me it won't happen again (it'd BETTER NOT!) but still I don't know how this could cause us to lose all the subcategory info.

Anyway, where I'm at now is I have a backup from July 8 which is pretty good. But I need to somehow recreate all the subcategories -- hopefully from backup, but I'm not sure how. So far everything I've tried has come up short. When I "Build All" it goes through the motions, but doesn't create any links.

I'm totally lost. Hopefully someone will help me walk through this. This is a major thing on my client's site,and he's getting really frustrated. It's been fine for so long.

Thanks in advance.
Marci :)

From what I've learned (I've been running links 2.0 for about the same length of time), you can't just change the names of categories without modifying each record that was within that category after you change the name of the category. I've had that frustration too.

The easiest thing might be to pull up the links.db file and do a search and replace in your text editor.

It's because the db file lists the name of the category in the db rather than the category number. When you do a build, it doesn't build those links because they don't have a valid category. There may be a way to change that in a cfg file or something, but I've never taken the time to figure it out. I'm just really careful when I set up the categories intitially.

There it is for what it's worth.

Hope it helps.

Thanks. I'll go the manual route and tell the owner not to change categories again! Thanks so much for the tip.
Marci :)
Marci :)