Lost MYI file

[Steve De Chellis]

I manage a web forum for a small company and last friday something happened.

15 minutes after midnight the file "posts.myi" went missing, along with it went several hundred thousand messages.

This occured just 45 minutes prior to our nightly backup so a good deal of messages were lost. I have not gotten an answer from the company yet on if they were using binary logging but considering the slugish performance of their mySQL server I expect they were not. (they have long had lots of sql connect errors during peak traffic times)

I've checked the logs and other then a large quantity of sql connect failures prior to the missing file error I don't see any evidence of hacking or forced entry attempts (the admin log is empty of activity at that hour of the day)

Can anyone give me an idea of what to look for in my logs that might indicate why this file suddenly disapeared? Could someone have snuck in a DROP TABLE message? Could someone have simply gained access to the webserver and deleted the file?

I don't want this to happen again!