All my Catagories have been deleted

Corrections, All my catagories are gone, and deleted, meanwhile all the tags have been removed from my posts but they are still there.

The same thing happened on a client’s site – I backed up the site and the database and upgraded WordPress to 3.1.1 and also about a dozen plugins. Now the list of categories is not showing on Posts>Categories, but on the individual posts page it does not have anything in the list of “All Categories”, but it does have a list of categories on the “Most Used” tab. Even so, none of the posts are categorized; all were changed to uncategorized. Similarly, no posts have tags any more, but on the post page the list of tags shows up in the “Most Used” list.

This is a live client site, I’d rather not just start turning off plugins to trial and error my way through figuring out the problem, so if anyone can point me in the right direction that would help. The site is timothytaylorartist.com; and the categories are gone from the sidebar widgets that listed recent posts by category, and the navigation page that listed posts by category is showing nothing in the dropdown box either, so it’s a problem, not to mention we’d rather not retag and recategorize everything. The problem is, even if we had to recategorize etc; we wouldn’t be able to, because the lists of categories is not showing in the post page.

I’m using the Suffusion Theme, and a long list of plugins. Maybe we can compare notes?

Same thing has just happened to me! The site has been running without a glitch for a year or more.

I can’t understand it.

Wow, this is my fault for not actually getting back to this earlier, with all I have been through.

Allow me to explain, I suffered the same issue you guys have, all my categories were in fact gone. Back end AND Front end.

At first I thought it was something in WordPress, but after about 30 minutes to an hour the problem fixed itself. My best guess is that it may be some minor hiccup with the web host of some sort. But as far as I can tell there’s NO REASON why all your categories should just up and right off vanish.

Ha – same thing here. They’ve all returned. Man, I just went to bed and tried not to think about it so I wouldn’t become a wreck, but all good now.

Phew!