Hello,
Being corrupted doesnt mean that they cant access them. Can use several tools to open the database and get information from them. Maybe not all information but they could still retrieve what someone is looking for if it didnt get corrupted.
You still have not given enough info and i have already answered your questions. You dont know that the backups dont exist. You are not the webmaster. You dont know what they have done. You dont know how long ago they have a backup from. Maybe they said it was corrupted cause they didnt want to bother to get it working and jsut get the site back up and running again? There are several thousands of reason why a site wouldnt want to restore a backup.
The size varies. It depends on how the posts are stored. As i already said they are stored as a SQL database and it can get large but it wont be that large even for 800K posts. Maybe a few GB at most.
As i said already twice now the database if they have any previous backups can be dug up and checked out. There are tools to use to even look at corrupted databases. Jsut as there are tools to recover files from a formatted drive. There is a tool to recover everything and anything.
Plain and simple you are overly paranoid. Sorry but if you are so worried about a police investigation about something you did you should not be in a public forum. As that information can be dug up and used at any point. Just about every webmaster keeps the files for reasons just like that. 7 years is the statute of limitations. If they could not provide the information from that long ago if asked they would be in serious trouble. Possibly be under arrest for hampering a police investigation.
Nothing is ever truely gone on a PC. It can be recovered. The Govt has tools that can recover files from PC that we have never even seen before. FRom formatted PC's, from crashed and hacked web servers. All of it can be recovered and used.
If you are truly that paranoid i suggest you font get on the internet. Cause they can always jsut trace back your IP address and get a court order for the ISP to hand over the information about you.
Plus who is to say that the investigation has not gone on this long for them to have the data themselves.
Being in a public forum and posting anyting on a public site there is always a record somewhere. There are sites out there that have archives of old sites. The old posts and databases could be there and they might not even need to go thru that webmaster to get the information needed.
Cheers,
Mak