Hi all I have a basic question in trying to understand what I just did with rollback of my site due to hack. I have lost a bunch of stuff and I want to understand which rollback resulted in which losses.

Can someone explain what exactly is contained in my database files vs what is contained in Public_html? I had the option of restoring one or the other or both after being hacked, and out of fear/ignorance, I went for it all.

Am I correct in saying that the Database holds only data like my articles, pictures, etc. ?

While the public-html files hold the structure of the site, template, components, modules, plugins, etc. ?

Or is it not as black and white as that?

Q: If I roll back the database but NOT public_html files, will I lose any of my site structure, template, etc? Or only articles, pics, users, etc? Or is this site structure also affected by database rollback?

Q: Reverse: If I only rollback public_html files, all of my articles, pics, etc will be preserved but I will lose all template & component changes?

Q: What are normal recommendations for rollback when your site is attacked? public_html only? , Database only? or both?

Thanks for anyone to help me to better understand this.

Regards
Scott

HiYes that is a pretty good description as I understand it. The trouble is that over 5000 files go to make up the standard joomla installation and in theory any one of these could have been altered (these are the files in your public_html folder). When my site was hacked I discovered that every index.html file had been changed just to say the site had been hacked (every folder has a blank index.html file!)I was lucky in that scripts etc could have been added instead.
The data base holds all the articles, images, links, scripts that you have added (google maps) etc and you can imagine how difficult and time consuming it would be to check through and identify and foreign additions.
I am sure that your database could be cleaned but it might be expensive.
So rollback to a time when you know the files and database are both secure.
It is a hard learning curve but I bet from now on you will make a regular backup of your site.

Thanks Mark for the suggestions. You are right I will start conducting regular backups! lesson learned.

regards
Scott

Hi Scott,

Closing this one for now. Start a new thread if you need more.

Cheers,
Ed