Staging push wiped WooCommerce orders from today

1. The situation
A) Staging site on Hostinger subdomain
B) Production on same account, separate docroot
C) Used KnownHost's "one-click sync" plugin to push staging to production

2. What went wrong
A) Sync was supposed to exclude wp_posts and postmeta
B) Option was checked but plugin behavior unclear
C) Today's orders (approximately 12) no longer visible in wp-admin

3. What I have tried
A) Checked production database: wp_posts timestamps stop at 2025-10-25 23:47
B) Checked staging database: same data, no orders from today
C) Hostinger daily backups run 04:00, so today's orders not captured
D) Binary logs not enabled on this plan

4. Questions
A) Is there any other place WooCommerce might have written this data?
B) Payment processor webhooks: can these reconstruct anything?
C) Has anyone recovered from similar with Stripe/PayPal metadata?

5. What I should have done
A) Tested sync behavior on non-critical data first
B) Enabled binary logging
C) Taken manual pre-sync snapshot

Any recovery paths appreciated.

- immediate checks
- payment gateway logs
- Stripe: Dashboard → Developers → Logs
- PayPal: IPN history
- email receipts
- customer inboxes
- store admin inbox
- NOTE: WooCommerce order emails fire on status transition
- if orders reached "processing" or "completed", email trail exists
- WARNING: do not write to production DB until recovery path chosen
- any insert/update may overwrite allocatable space
- webhook replay possibility
- depends on gateway retention
- Stripe: 30 days
- PayPal: 28 days typical
- ---
- long term
- separate database credentials for staging
- table-level grants excluding wp_posts
- or? Consider wp db prefix variation

Good call on not writing to the DB yet