SA locked up and seemingly dumped the DB we've been building

[FH <fh...@usa.net>]

When I got in Monday morning our mail server was almost completely locked up. 
I wasn't able to login remotely, I was eventually able to login on the
terminal but that was only after pulling the network connection and giving it
a little time.  Once I got on I found a bunch of out of memory/swap space
errors and top showed something like 90%+ CPU dedicated to User processes w/
spamd being the largest contributor, so all that probably explains the lock
up.  BTW the machine is an old Sun that is about to be replaced so I'm not too
worried about this past performance, and this has happened once or twice in
the past.  When this has happened in the past what I've done is kill (I try to
do it gracefully) the spamd process and restart it.  This time however after
restarting it it seems like we are almost back to the beginning wrt the bayes
DB.  What I mean is messages that were getting marked properly on Sunday were
no longer getting marked properly on Monday (this is just going by subject
lines which I have a record of) and the performance/training metrics I keep
went from about 10-15% missed to 20-30%+ missed.  A lot of the scores are
coming up as 2 (4 is my threshold for marking something as spam) which again
seems to be like it was when we first started IIRC, and some are even coming
up as negative scores now :(  

Has this happened to anyone else before, what's the best way to recover?  I
should have a copy of the files in the bayes_path folder on a backup that was
done last week.  Could it be as simple as putting those file back in place and
restarting spamd[1], might that get some of the info back?  Is there any way
to verify what exactly happened?  I searched the log files and didn't see
anything unusual reported by spamd (missing/corrupt DB errors or the such). 
Are there any other commands I can run to double check that the current DB is
ok, maybe it just needs to be reindexed or something? 

Thanks,
Forrest


[1] On a related note, when I setup the new machine, can I install
spamassassin and then copy these files over the default files that are
created?  Will that essentially move the bayes DB to the new machine?