On the off chance that no one has thought of this yet, has your friend contacted his web host’s support folks? Almost all do automatic backups daily and/or weekly. Of both files and databases.
Be sure to act quickly, as hosts don’t keep their backups for long.
Other than that, I’ve seen a few people without backups go to archive.org and re-create their site from its state 6 or more months ago.
He is in touch with the hosting company. They couldn’t find a backup but are still looking.
I also found a Python script that may be able to pull his entire site from Google Cache, but I’m not a Python expert so not sure how to run it. https://gist.github.com/minhajuddin/1504425
pull his entire site from Google Cache…
That will pull the html source and images from Google – the site content – but not the original database. You will still have to rebuild the site and theme and repost all content into WordPress.
Hard lesson to learn how to keep your own backups: https://wordpress.org/plugins/search.php?q=backup
He got very luck. I was able to repair a few of the tables with a manual SQL query, but the posts table was a goner.
While I was working on it, the hosting company managed to dig up a copy of the database from a few weeks ago. A few posts lost, but not 8 years worth. And now running backups on a schedule for him.
Not a best case, but not a worst case either.
