If there where all stord in the DB if you dont have a backup of the DB then you are to put it simply are screwed I am a DB adminstrator and once data gone it gone....
I spoke too soon. Thankfully the nop dev team did a great job coding this functionality and the image files where created on the file sytem for me. Just took a while to do. Imagine my glee as the images started to re-appear on the site agin one-by-one.
Pheewww!
This button could definately do with an "Are you sure" dialog though.
Apart from copying the newly created images from the live server to local, is there anything else I need to do to my local copy before publishing to live again?