Well, things are looking pretty sticky with this problem. My programmer says that somehow the system was spreading the attachments among the database table and a folder. He didn't think it could do that, and doesn;t know how it happened, much less why it worked for a while like that. But fixing it may be a problem.
Compounding the problem is that my server admin did NOT set up the backup drive that was supposed to be taking backups of all the sites on the server every day. So it appears that the folder that contained some of those attachments may be gone and unrecoverable. No telling which ones might have been in there. Probably won't know till the dust settles. I know all the posts are saved, as I have taken it upon myself to run my own backup routine every night and then save those files to my local drive.
Expect some down time without warning and no idea of the duration. I hope my programmer isn't going to be charging me by the hour on this one......
