Unbelievable crash!

I'm sorry if this is the wrong location for this post but I have never seen an issue like this anywhere in the forum.

Zen Cart Puked - As I am going over a Zen Cart backend issue with a client on the phone we hit something, perhaps simultaneously, and everything gone! No Categories or Products, just gone. All of the customer data and gui is there, but no products. Well a simple DB restore should do the trick right? Well sorta, the products and categories are back but all reference to images, via image handler, is now gone - so no pictures. How could this possible be? This is good restore from a good working zen cart - how can things be any different that when I backed up?

Does anyone know how to compare two db backups to see what happened?
I backed up the flawed database before I did a restore.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.

gogo:

Well a simple DB restore should do the trick right? Well sorta, the products and categories are back but all reference to images, via image handler, is now gone - so no pictures. How could this possible be?Image Handler caches files as well. If you lost your file cache, then you may need to re-build its cache, and maybe even reload image files if you've also had a filesystem problem.

gogo:

Does anyone know how to compare two db backups to see what happened?
I backed up the flawed database before I did a restore.WinMerge or Beyond Compare will let you do text-file comparisons. This may at least give you some clues to differences.