Earlier this week I was approached by a guy who had purchased a site from the original developer, he’d bought it a few months ago and it still wasn’t up on his server in a running state.

Anyway the problem with the site was that the database dump was corrupt, so I had a look to see what was wrong with it. In that dump in random locations where null characters, just over 31,000 of them.

So, I got in touch with the new site owner and explained the problem to him, we had a number of choices, fix the dump (yuk), get a new dump if possible, or start fresh and lose everything.

Obviously number 3 was not an option, and number 1 wasn’t looking good because the original site owner was hard to get hold of, and also very slow to do anything.

So the decision was made to contact the original owner and while waiting for a reply to start removing the NULL characters. I ran up a few scripts and had the number of NULLS down to just over 17,000 pretty quickly.

Then it becamse messy, everything left was something that couldn’t be scripted, at that point we decided to wait another day for a response from the original owner, and fortunately he replied and did as I had asked pretty quickly.

So I now have the complete database on my machine, but the major content table is missing 99% of the content, back to the original author who states that the site ran out of disk space causing corruption, but he has a copy of the missing content and he will send it to me when he gets home from work in a couple of hours. (that was 16 hours ago, still waiting)

Anyway the site isn’t fixed, but it will be soon with any luck.

The moral of this story has to be if your buying virtual property either ensure you have a written contract or make a deal where you pay some up front and some after you have received your goods in good working order.