How to rebuild zoneminder/events after catastrophic disk failure

[faginbagin]

So my disk failed completely and without warning. I had backups of the operating system, but not of the partition where events, images and temp directories were stored. I have recreated those top level directories. But, before I start zoneminder, should I try to recreate the subdirectories and symlinks for the monitors, or will zoneminder do that automatically. I have a pretty good idea of what I'd have to do, since I have access to another zoneminder system. I know there should be one directory per monitor whose name is the monitor ID and there should be a symlink to it with the monitor's name. But to do it properly, I'll have to poke around the database to collect the ID to monitor name associations. If zoneminder will do that for me, it's one less thing I need to do.

Related question: Would it help if I just truncated the database tables related to events, or just let zoneminder do the database cleanup?

Time to think about backing up all the event data!

[faginbagin]

To answer my own questions: zoneminder did recreate the numbered directories for each monitor, when I started it up a few minutes ago. But it hasn't yet created the symlinks with the monitor names. And it's probably too soon to know if it will automatically delete the database records for events that no longer have any video or snapshot files.