A user, chantal, reports that her Discourse forum was deleted after her friend, who managed the server, failed to maintain backups. She asks if restoration is possible without a backup and offers to pay for support. HAWK confirms that without a backup, recovery is not possible. Firepup650 explains that while email and login details are helpful, they cannot restore a wiped server, and the latest available backup is from December 20. They also note that backups should be triggered via the admin interface and emailed. pfaffman adds that since backups were stored on the server, they were lost with it, and suggests that using a reputable hosting provider with separate backup systems (like S3 or DigitalOcean) would prevent future data loss.
Hello,
I had a Discourse forum managed by a friend who promised me he was doing backups when he wasn’t. Basically, today I woke up to find out that he somehow managed to delete his whole server, along with my forum.
Is there any way how to restore the forum with no backup? 
Willing to pay for any extra support needed.
Thank you !
If he has truly wiped the server then without a backup there is nothing you can do, unfortunately.
Even if I have e-mail of the forum and login? The latest backup saved is from 20.December.
Would it be possible to hire someone to do backups on the forum daily so that this doesn’t happen again?
I am not into IT and only manage the forum using iPhone, so I have no means to be downloading and saving. I have to rely on friends promising me that they are taking care of it.
In the long run, that’s not very much. You could restore a backup that way, but you can’t roll back a server wipe.
Then that is the most recent thing that you could restore.
You should be able to trigger backups from the admin interface, and then have a download link to that backup emailed to you.
If the backups had been on S3 or digital spaces then they would not be deleted when the server was (unless they was deleted too). Since the server contained the backups they are gone too. It could be possible that he had digital ocean making backups of the server, but those cost money too, so I’d guess he didn’t create those or deleted them too.
If you want control over your site you should pay for your own vm or hosting from a reputable company.