I did some clever datbase querying to see what can be restored from the missing topics. And that might be very useful.
Look at this example:
| Jean Michel Jarre Special Radio Broadcast | 192699 | 6308 |
| Rumor of European Tour (2015) | 192701 | 6309 |
| Never-seen interview from the late 90's | 192715 | -------- |
| JMJ - Lodown Magazine Interview | 192751 | 6311 |
| Waldorf Blofeld what you like it? | 192815 | 6314 |
| Jean Michel Jarre Studio via Faze Magazin: | 192820 | -------- |
| James Last RIP | 192828 | 6316 |
| JM @ Qwartz Music Awards 2015 | 192838 | -------- |
| Pêle-Mêle, Radio Plus - 16 June 2015 | 192872 | -------- |
| Guy Delacoix & Jo Hammer | 192883 | -------- |
| Paris - La Defense Concert - 25th Anniversary | 192923 | 6320 |
| ZOOLOOK REVISITED (2016) | 192955 | 6321 |
| Zoolook Revisted Album | 192966 | 6322 |
| James Horner (film composer) passed away. | 192993 | 6323 |
This is a list of posts that have a subject in the record. I combined this with the post/topic table to see if these posts have a topic-id. If not, it will show "-------".
As you can see, you can easily fill in the missing topic-ids for these posts. This means most, if not all, topics can be restored. That's fantastic news of course, but this is only a small part of the solution: I can only get the first post of each topic this way.
Compare it to a large jigsaw puzzle. Usually you start with the edges. These first posts are the edges of the puzzle. And of course, the original poster and post time is still lost this way. But hey, it's something.
Bear in mind, this is a time-consuming process, because a human eye has to check if this is OK.
You can see topics with IDs 6312 and 6313 are not in the list, these probably are deleted topics (usually spam messages).