What a pallaver! After that rather nasty hacking effort I've managed to recover (thanks to the Google cache and gil) most of what was going on here. Three games suffer breaks in the space-time continuum: this one (we're missing the discussion of the Furcation Game, which needn't be a tragedy); two lines of a limerick are missing; and an unspecified number of lies have gone. (No they haven't). Also, the timestamps on recovered moves have all been set to the notional recovery time; but seeing as these are only fleetingly displayed on the front page, we can probably live without that. Next job: instigate rolling backups, I think.
Apologies for the tumbleweed. As I remarked at MCiOS, so sooner had I wielded my magic wand and managed to get roughly back how we were, did the new server develop a hardware fault. Losing, you guessed it, any moves in the brief period we were back online. Since these probably number about three, I think we can pretend these never happened without any space-time paradoxes setting in.
Good that worked! Right, as to the future. When I return to the office tomorrow, I will install some stuff on the machines there that will not only back this thing up daily, but also allow me to restore from anywhere in the world, rather than rely on my laptop being (a) with me and (b) near a phone socket. This means that if there are any failures between now and, say, tomorrow morning, there's not much I can do. After that, this site always be able to stay alive as long as I do. If more problems occur, I shall consider moving to a more upscale hosting company that has downtime guarantees (or should that be uptime guarantees?). I'm hoping, however, that this is very much a one-off occurrence.