on December 18th, my web site went down.
i checked my web host provider's web site, and found out that the server i was hosted on went down. not only did it go down, but its hard drive had failed. not only that, they didnt seem to have any backups that worked!
so, my site was down, and wasn't going to come back up until i restored a backup.
my most recent backup was from September 1st, 2006. so a LOT of stuff was lost. luckily, using Google and MSN's cache system, i was able to restore the front page stories. however, i need to restore most of the content that was linked to on the menus. around the end of September, i moved many of the files on my site into a MySQL database to make things easier to manage. well, that MySQL file was lost, and all i have are local backups of the files. so i have to go back and put them into the database again.
my web host did locate a backup from October 8th. that helped a lot, but some stuff was still lost.
i used the down time to upgrade my forum, wordpress, and multiple plugins.