Videos that were there are now missing

We have several videos that have suddenly disappeared, but not all of them (I'm guestimating around 10% of videos are affected, belonging to various members with various upload dates ranging from 80 days ago to 581 days ago). There doesn't seem to be any common denominator except that today when I looked at the video page, there are blank black pages instead of the videos themselves.

The comments from people who watched the videos are still intact (and proof that yes, indeed, they were once there) but no videos and no error messages.

Any notions of what happened and how to recover the videos?

(Note that I can't do a backup because too much site activity would be lost, so unless there's a selective backup of these specific videos, a backup won't work.)

I had hoped this was a one time issue, especially since I haven't found a fix, but now not only are videos continuing to just *vanish* but sounds as well.

A few of the possible solutions that I've checked and/or tried in my hours of researching this issue:

• File permissions: I've made sure that every possible file permission relating to video and sound modules are set correctly (some of these were set incorrectly at first but now are set correctly)
• Cron jobs: I've made sure that the cron jobs are set to run correctly (they were)
• RMS settings: all was set up correctly including the checked Use RMS box and the port settings
• Clearing the cache (repeatedly done, it's now b/cm a compulsive habit of mine to clear cache!)

Note that all of these are files that uploaded just fine, were working for a while (until they suddenly weren't) and were commented on and discussed when they were working.

The last suggestion I found was to see if the files were actually in the folders: took me a while but I finally tracked down how to find out the video and sound file names so that I can see if they are in the flash/module/video/files folder (for anyone else who needs to know how to do this - firebug the thumbnail image of your video, it will give you the number designation of your files for that particular one, then look for the m4v or mp4 or whatever file type of that number)... and sure enough I have MISSING FILES!!

*GASP*

Soooooo how and why is my Dolphin installation randomly deleting my files? And, more importantly, how can I stop it from happening?

Good News: Files aren't missing, they are youtube files that aren't showing and aren't in the flash/modules/video/files folder.

Bad News: Files that are in the folder as well as youtube linked vids aren't showing up at all (see attached image).

When I updated my test site, all of the videos and sounds and pictures all showed back up. However since a bunch of other stuff breaks because my site is so heavily modded, I can't update my live site.

Is this a clue that might indicate how I can get the media files to show up again on the live site with the 7.0.9 installation?