Well, that sucked. I managed to get an all but complete dump of my comments.db file with db_dump on my server, but then nothing would parse or load that file after that. Banged around with it for awhile until I finally realized how to parse the dump file myself with a perl one-liner and rebuilt the comments DBM file that way.
Immediately after that, I migrated everything to MySQL. Not a silver bullet, but it seems a better idea than relying on those DBM files. They seemed neat & clever at first - but now that I have a bit invested here, they're an annoyance.
I think I managed to recover the last few comments I got while things went wonky, but if I happened to miss one of yours, I'm sorry. I'm glad I recovered the comments, though, because I tend to think that comments left here are often more valuable than whatever dross I may have spewed in the first place.
shortname=ooobef