I know halloween has passed, but here's a horror story.

I have two galleries, with two sets of zenphoto and two PHP databases running on the same server.
Which works great when I'm not a complete idiot.

I have a gallery of my artwork and another for my photography.

In the artwork one I spent a few hours if not days adding descriptions to each image.

I've done the same to my photography gallery too.

I just upgraded the photography one to 1.1.2 (from 1.1.0) so I can get watermarks to work.
I get the duplicate entry error, so I copied the files (zp-core and root) from my art gallery, which worked, to my photo gallery. Then I made the mistake.

I forgot to edit zp-config.php to change the file to look at the photo PHP database rather than the art one. :-(

This had the effect of neatly removing all the descriptions I spent weeks, if not months adding.

But hey, once you make a mistake like that, you learn your lesson.

Not to mention it lost my manual ordering. (Just noticed that).
And yes, I know I should have backed up the database. Don't rub it in ;-)

Zenphoto should have a "back up" mechanism that writes the database data to text files in the album folders. This is an excellent idea I just thought of...

Then you could move your installation, repair a lost installation, and keep all your data.

Or you could just use the text file format to pre-enter album data when uploading...

Thanks for the idea, I'll add it to the list.

I have done the same thing. That is why the database id is displayed in Admin. Unfortunately, that may be too late.

I just finished updating my website, using a new cms, bringing together what was spread over different websites before (blog, photos, personal page) and right when everything was done I got an error in the zenphoto database and lost all my album descriptions and orders. Now I will spent another couple of hours just re-entering this stuff. But this time I will make a backup once I'm finished.