Lost data in Sitefinity

For over a month I've worked on a project for a client.  The server running Sitefinity is managed and maintained by a 3rd party hosting service and the version of Sitefinity is 4.2.  I use Visual Studio 2010 for development.

 Everything has been fine until this morning when I attempted to navigate with Google Chrome to the Sitefinity Dashboard.  When I attempted to do so I received an error page stating the site was off line and to remove the app_offline.htm file to reactivate the site.  I then opened Visual Studio to see if the app_offline.htm file was present in the filesystem.  It was not, but I was still receiving the message.  After a few minutes of looking through the file system I was satisfied there wasn't an app_offline.htm file on the server at all, yet the Dashboard still gave this message.  After about 10 minutes the Dashboard finally began to work, but as I looked at the pages I discovered about 8 days worth of work was missing.

Does anyone know what would cause this?

And as well, does anyone know how I can independently backup and/or restore the Sitefinity database outside of any backup procedures instituted by the hosting service?

Hi Kevin,

app_offline.htm is returned from the web server it is not part of Sitefinity project. I am not sure what could have caused this. Maybe the servers went broke and the hosting backued up the site to previous state since the current data was lost.
The hosting provider should have been making regular backups of the contents you uploaded (this is included in most hosting plans, but this could vary depending on the hosting plan). Can you contact the hosting provider and inquire about how can you obtain the latest backup.

The hosting panel may have an option that will allow you to download database backups. If not download the database and manually create a backup.

Greetings,
Stanislav Velikov
the Telerik team