This is the first time I have ever lost site data in over 10 years. Even when I migrated from WordPress to Drupal I managed to bring all my pages and posts over.
The outage happened on 19 May 2019 in the evening when I updated composer for Drupal and regardless of what actually went wrong, normally you can roll back to a previous backup. I asked my hosting provider to do this a day later but it also did not work (probably because the problem was with the underlying PHP and not the site data or database. I then requested a full cPanel restore by Wednesday but this then broke everything. It seems the hoster did not have very complete backups as I also requested an older one but the site remained down.
In the meantime, I had started that week to manually rebuild my site on my new hosting at Digital Ocean that I was planning to migrate to later in 2019. The challenge I had was that as my original hoster kept deleting my Softaculous backups (yes really!) I had no new backup. I tried initially with what was on the hosting site but it was broken and I had struggled for days with it. Eventually, I used a March backup that I had offline and this restored fine BUT I have lost about two months of posts which is really sad.
But stability is important, as is getting back on track, so let’s get this site live again. I will redirect any calls to https://gadgeteer.co.za to this site but cannot forward the full URL’s, even though the site URL’s here are identical (domain name differs).
However, if you used a link say like https://gadgeteer.co.za/blog it will work identically as https://drupal.gadgeteerza.co.za/blog here.