My first post please help, VM Categories vanishing after days of no problems.

[voltayr]

we have a site www.unleashedjewelry.com, in the first week we had product images vanish not sure what i did to fix it but i ftp'd a backup of the product images up to the site and fixed the problem... well over a month later the site lost categories they no longer appear on the front end and in the category tree in the VM backend they just dont exist.. under Pendants at the top of the site there should be Biker Pendants,  this entire category doesnt exist anymore in the backend... how is this happening? 

I've searched all over and nobody seems to have this problem but us... so im leaving the database alone but restoring the actual FTP files from a few weeks ago just incase files got corrupted... its in the process now may take a few hours...

Any ideas?  we didnt change language, i think the last thing the owner was doing in the system was adding custom fields, for their ring sizes...  they had an order the previous day for a biker pendant so we know the customer had to have seen that area of the site working just a day earlier... but today poof almost 10 to 15 categories vanished, front and backend... PLEASE help!!!

oh the error we get with SEF on is 404 error, the error we get with SEF off and .htaccess renamed to htaccess.txt is COM_VIRTUEMART_CAT_NOT_FOUND, my only guess is some kind of crazy virus?


God bless,

Voltaire - Website Design Daytona Beach.

[jenkinhill]

You should be making regular full site backups using Akeeba so if anything like this happens you can immediately restore to a version that worked. Make a full backup copy now for testing purposes.

I see some missing images and some non-existent categories, but the cat error message looks like something related to SEF or to .htaccess rewriting. Are you using Joomla 2.5 & VM's native SEF? Try without SEF and .htaccess having refreshed the browser.
If using Joomla cache, then turn it off.

That looks like an older version of VirtueMart you are using, but it uses extensive template overwrites, so upgrading to current will take a bit of work. Any chance that the site has been hacked? Anything odd in the access logs? Older versions of Joomla & VM are insecure, but I have never seen a hacked site do what yours is doing.

[voltayr]

Thanks alot for your post ya i had site hack thoughts as well... ya i messed the the SEF and same thing the actuall categories in the backend are GONE.... i will have them do regular back ups with akeeba i did take one a few weeks ago so im going to attempt to restore a copy of it on a test server and see if everything is there if so ill swap the sites out... ya i got the them from virtuemarttemplates.com great theme designs there and ya i see that it would take a bit to upgrade it....

Thx again for your response wasnt sure if this was a common problem, like i said never found another user with this issue on a google search...

i pray the backup was recent enough thx!!!

God bless,

Voltaire

[voltayr]

Ok well figured it out, little upset but hey its all good... what happened was the top nav was built on the site... they then created their categories and never created categories that matched the nav exactly SO there were dead buttons that went no where!!!!  thats all it was im removing the darn psuedo buttons now...

thanks for your help, figured id post my solution hate it when someone says i figured it out.. and they dont post what they did LOL.

God bless,

Voltaire

[jenkinhill]

Thanks for posting the solution.