All data from the past few hours is lost

Unfortunately all the data from the past few hours (since about 8pm US Eastern time) has been deleted.

Here's how it happened:

1. A GotW entry was mistakenly deleted by a mod. This is a hard delete, so to restore it I went to look in the previous day's database backup. This backup contains data for all the tables in the database.
2. In order to restore just the GotW info, I went to restore the backup into a separate database from the one used by the site.
3. Instead, this operation tried to write the data in the backup on top of the actual GWM database. (I still don't understand why this happened!) This corrupted the database.
4. I deleted the database and restored the backup from a few hours ago.

Oops.

What went well: The site backups that are automatically taken work.

What went poorly: I should have manually done a backup before starting to mess around with the database. There still would have been downtime but there would have been much less data loss.

Where I got lucky: The auto-backup happened to run a few hours before all this. It could have been worse.

just when i uploaded some stuff for the first time in a while lol

A lesson for us all Chainer. Thankfully, your quick actions saved the day! Well done!