Server Restarted and lost everything

Question

I tried connecting to Jira and got a generic error.
I tried restarting jira by running stop-jira.bat and start-jira.bat with no success.
I restarted the windows server it was running on, after reboot it loaded up and asked me to go through the setup (create user and password, select language and select name) but kept my existing database (mysql8).
Once it had finished it did not import any of the projects or issues.
There was no backup made (that i know of). Is there any way i can restore the data ?

Scott Patterson_t4ttw7 · Answer

I did not put in my db configuration into Jira when it restarted so i have to assume it can grab that without issue (i have checked and everything seems fine with the file itself).
I have looked through the database but nothing is there, all the tables are present but nothing is in "audit_log". I'm not sure where the issues or projects are kept so i cant look there but at this point I'm assuming they are deleted too.
The database is only running locally on a VM which only I know how to access so "someone" is not a option.
I have been looking through the files to see if a backup was present but the only thing i can find is an 'entities.xml' and 'activeobjects.xml' which does seem to contain all the data from my projects.
Is it possible to restore from these files ?

Alexander Pappert · Answer

do you have the jira xml backup?

then you could import this one

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

This happens when the dbconfig.xml file in the home directory is missing or unreadable by the user running Jira

If you gave it a database with Jira data in it already, it should recognise that and enable everything, but unless the database matches the home directory, you will need to run a re-index to get things like search and gadgets to work again.

I would try a re-index.  If that does not bring back any issues or projects, then we know that someone or something has destroyed your database.  If it does, then we can be pretty sure that someone or something destroyed your home directory.