1 album dissapeared after manually editing a .dat file

hey guys.
on one of my users sites, someone had posted a comment that included a phone number. for privacy reasons, i opened up vi and i manually edited the respective:

album.dat
album.dat.bak

and made the phone number xxx-xxxx.
now for some reason when you view his gallery website, that album doesnt appear. its just not listed at all. i even changed it back to the number. but its still gone. i have no idea why this happened.

i know the album still exists, all the pictures etc. i cant login to his gallery via the gallery login as i dont know the password. but i'd appreciate some insight as to how to remedy the situation. i feel quite bad.

any suggestions?

cheers.
ken

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Gallery URL (optional but very useful): private unless neccessary.
Gallery version: 1.3.1
Apache version: 1.3.27
PHP version: 4.3.1
Operating system: fbsd 4.8-stable
Web browser/version (if applicable): n/a (but i looked in ie)