Images - Now you see it, now you don't

[Someformofhuman]

Hi to whoever who read this,

I've been using Coppermine Gallery for over a year now, [A pathetic version 1.4.9(stable) Gee, I'm a guy who doesn't have much free time on my hands to do upgrades as I'm kind of a busy designer] there isn't any problems till today when I entered to my gallery and found all my images and my personal photography are missing. It's weird though, as I scrolled down to looked at the number of comments there was, it stated 40. There are exactly 799 images in the album directory which I have split into 2 folders, userpics1 and userpics2 according to my cpanel. What is uncanny is that the exact 799 images are still in those 2 folders, and my gallery shows nothing at all, when it actually supposed to.

http://www.sky-scrapers.org/gallery/index.php

Then, I went on to check the PhpMyAdmin and well... I was thinking someone might have hacked the database tables; I would suspect that a function that calls the images to the gallery is corrupted. I selected all the fields and databases and clicked "repair" but to no avail.

I am a person who doesn't like to seek for help or bother others (I usually solve problems my own ways before "disturbing" others unintentionally) But at this moment, posting a thread here is my last pit-stop to salvation.

Is there anyway that I can relink the images back to the gallery? Or do I have to upload from scratch all over again?
If you need the debugging info, I can let you guys have a look at it.

Thanks
Stefan

[Joachim Müller]

[A pathetic version 1.4.9(stable) Gee, I'm a guy who doesn't have much free time on my hands to do upgrades as I'm kind of a busy designer]

Not upgrading is not an option. No matter how busy you are: upgrading is mandatory. If you can't afford to spend the little time to upgrade and perform regular backups, then don't run a pre-made script like coppermine at all. This being said, you should perform a backup first, then perform the upgrade to the most recent stable (currently cpg1.4.13) now.
Just by looking at your gallery it's impossible to determine wether your gallery has been hacked or if just some database entries got missing. Chances are high though that you haven't been hacked. Here's why: usually, hacking attempts fall into two categories. Hacking category one: the hacker tries to (ab)use your site for malicious themes (e.g. for hosting illegal files). If this is the case, the hacker tries not to be noticed at all, so he wouldn't deliberately delete legitimate content. Hacking category two falls into the section "defacement": the hacker tries to edit the look of your site (usually it displays a message like "this site has been hacked by evil hacker XXX"). This doesn't seem to be the case.
No matter what, after performing the upgrade you should scan for malicious backdoors if a hacker has left any. Additionally, change all your passwords as a security precaution.

So what are your options (after performing the upgrade, which is mandatory no matter what)? The best option would be to restore your site from a backup (if you have one). If you don't have a backup, try to find out if the files are still there and just the corresponding database entries are missing. If this is the case, perform a batch-add to re-add all files to the database. If the files don't exist any more, you're stuck: you will have to re-upload them and re-add them to the database using batch-add again.

Hopefully, this issue will teach you the importance of upgrading just when a new release comes out. It should as well teach you the importance of frequent backups.

Joachim