[theo_luddite]

Generally speaking (and with no knowledge of what the issue was on here), the IT professionals at any business have a system to manually or automatically back-up each days "transactions" to try and ensure what comes in (e.g. "Purchase Orders, Raw Material deliveries, Customer Payments") and what goes out ("Invoices, Deliveries, Purchase Orders, Wages, Tax & Pensions") so that if there's a system crash, the power goes off, a bad-actor tries to disrupt something, they can restore the system to it's last known stable state as quickly as possible. They used to be 7 day rolling back-ups (to a physical storage such as a tape for each day, CD-ROM's, or a remote hard drive) but these days they might use other storage methods.

The seriously bad actors that try to disrupt systems (and grab folks login/password/bank details) don't just affect the businesses own "servers" whether internal or in a big warehouse full of servers somewhere that they call "The Cloud", they can also infect much of the hardware attached to it (your laptop, production equipment, etc) either physically (internal network) or remotely (internet). See JLR/Coop/Marks and Sparks as recent examples. More often than not that's how they get in by sending an email (or breaking a weak password) to someone who uses a laptop for "other" business.

That inevitably, on a system that can be accessed by customers (e.g. us) 24 hours a day and it's determined that the system was "destabilised" at some time over the weekend, regardless of whether weekend back-up's were available or not, after investigation, you don't reinstall what might turn out to be an unstable back-up and leave yourself open to the same problem, whatever that was.

Based on what you've told us Snoots, it seems that last Friday's back-up was the most stable so it makes sense for Mark to roll that back in and start again from there, as frustrating as it is for all of us. That back-up overwrites anything we've input since that back-up was saved so whilst there may be some of our stuff in those unstable back-up's, they'll be overwritten when this weekends back-up roll, assuming it's a 7 day rolling back-up and not a 28 day or 1 month rolling back-up. At that point they will practically disappear from the ether though there might still be a fingerprint on the "Cloud" somewhere that someone can access with the right software until the physical space is more thoroughly overwritten.

Hope that's not baffled you even more.