My next-door neighbor ran into a problem today: “We have a petition to be signed as you did Chris, on Medicardforall.com. Occasionally, weirdos have filled up some petitioner comments with obscenities of even worse long paragraphs on insurance or other nonsense. Dan is checking regularly and gets rid of same in a way he doesn't think I need to learn to do it. But now it seems someone or thing has wiped all of our over 100 petitioners off. Do you not have some interactive communications on your websites? If so, how do you keep them clean or useable for your purpose?”
I wrote back: On the subject of securing Web site data, it largely depends on the software you're running – and if there are known vulnerabilities for it. The guestbook script may have been hacked, or the script (itself) may have inadvertently deleted the data if there was a bug in it. Either way, your Web host should have a backup copy of your site and all of its most recent data – and I hope that you have a backup, too? If you're not keeping or making local backups of this data, I'd suggest starting right now.
Google to the rescue! I don't know how recently your signatories were deleted, but I went to Google, entered each guestbook URL into the Google search field, then clicked the subsequent “Google's Cache” link and then saved the file(s) to my hard drive. I don't know if you'll be able to import them into the guestbook script again, but I would suggest (if that's not possible) to combine these two pages into one, then link to them at the top of the guestbook page. This way, people can still look at the old signatures (mine included).