even in production mode, a rails app will save the contents of every get and post made. this saved my bacon today as a questionare form had two fields specified incorrectly such that their values were not being saved to the database. by parsing the log/production.log file, the data was recovered.
$ script/runner -e production 'Demographic.restore_from_log' (truncated version) class Demographic < ActiveRecord::Base def self.restore_from_log IO.foreach("log/production.log") do |l| form_log = /Parameters: (.*)/.match(l) if form_log params = eval(form_log[1]) # the params hash contains the variables from the post end end end