As you may know, one of the SCSI disks failed. We have regular backups, but since it was set up to ignore the servers' /data/ folders (which are huge and we don't need frequent backups of that since it does not change). However the backup exclusion messed up and it did not back up any data folder at all. Since other programs use data folders (this forums' database server for example) to store their data those have not been backed up either. So basiaclly we have the less useful things backed up and the things we do need backups from were excluded...
Our most recent forum database backup is from April 2008. Since this is very old we thought there would be little use in restoring it and instead have decided to update our forum and website software and to improve the subforum structure a bit. We hope the reinstall did some good, although it indeed is unfortunate that we lost all old posts.
If you think there is anything about the forum structure or things like that that should be changed/improved/removed/added, please tell. Now is the time to update the categories and forums that will be used for quite a while again.