The above wasn't completed and it appears I timed out the editor when I tried to correct it so here's the whole post:
I pulled the greatest bonehead maneuver of my career, I killed the contents of the forum/uploads folder!
After upgrading to IPB 4.7 we decided to also upgrade our hosting solution and changed servers, things have been a little laggy and I was looking through the ACP settings and saw that under the files area there were storage settings which had two choices listed, it was at the time pointing to:
File System: /home/xwebs01/public_html/malecaster/forum/uploads
and I saw that there was another file system that matched the FTP address used by the FTP/File software on my host cPanel:
File System: /home4/xwebs01/public_html/malecaster/forum/uploads
Thinking this was maybe the pointer to the new server I went through and changed ALL of the settings for some 26 fields from "Custom Emoji Required" to "filestorage__taskmanager_Cardcover" including the fields for "Theme Resources Required", "Attachments", and "Gallery Images" from the /home File System to the /home4 one.
Immediately my board blew up, reverting to simple HTML script and throwing errors like: [[Template core/global/global/includeCSS is throwing an error. This theme may be out of date. Run the support tool in the AdminCP to restore the default theme.]]
I can get into the ACP and the forum, but as I said it's all basic HTML output. I tried to change constants.php and use the self hosted recovery mode to get into the ACP by adding recovery_mode True, but all that did was get me the following error:
This page isn’t working
malecaster.x-webs.com is currently unable to handle this request.
HTTP ERROR 500
When I now use the FTP program built into the cPanel to go into the "uploads" folder it shows only "ghost" files in there, these "ghosts" are all of the files and folders that are supposed to be in the upload directory, but they just appear to be names, nothing more. All of them have the creation date of Dec. 31, 1969, 06:00 PM. No file size, file type, or permissions listed, just blank fields. I cannot open, move, delete, edit, rename, etc. any of the files or enter any of the "ghost" folders. When I try to upload a file to the "uploads" directory it just disappears into the void. I've tried copying over some of the profile images that exist and it does nothing, even if I tell it to overwrite. I even tried uploading a new file and again it just goes "poof".
When I login with WS_FTP Professional I can SEE the upload sub folder in the forum folder, however when I try to access it with WS_FTP I get the following error:
550 Can't change directory to /public_html/malecaster/forum/uploads: Permission denied
XCWD /public_html/malecaster/forum/uploads
550 Can't change directory to /public_html/malecaster/forum/uploads: Permission denied
PWD
I did manage to use the HTML version of the ACP to go in and change the file system BACK to the original address for all of the inputs, but still can only get HTML versions of the board and ACP to work.
I DID backup the forum before we upgraded last month, so I have all the profile images, gallery uploads, and attachments going back to 2006 at least so I can restore those if necessary. I just do not have any of the files from AFTER the upgrade. Including the php and css files that should be in the upload folder and it's subfolders.
I have screen captures if needed to see what I'm dealing with (they won't attach here for some reason).
Fingers crossed someone out there has a fix that doesn't involve completely re-installing everything from scratch!!
Thanks for reading my opus! Rick