@panther I think the reason those images are missing is due to restore from backup. It appears we lost about 18 hours worth of file uploads. I checked and saw older images were present, so I believe only recently uploaded images are gone.
I did attempt to restore the database from backup. As part of that would have been cutting a fresh backup before attempting the restore, but I noticed that our backup database files don't restore cleanly... So the new backup mechanism is not working.
I'm going to drop those efforts for a self-hosted backup process & I re-enabled linode backup of forums at a cost of $2.50/month.