Logged In: YES 
user_id=6405

This is quite disturbing, since it means that the journal is being dropped 
(or cleared) somehow. That doesn't make sense *at all* since I've had a 
look at the code and the only time the journal is dropped is when classes 
are removed *outright* from the schema. If that was the case, then all 
of the *items* for the class would also have disappeared. 
 
Please, if you have a chance look at the 
roundup/backends/rdbms_common.py code and see if you come to a 
different conclusion. I see only one place that has the journal table being 
dropped, and that's in drop_class - which is called when classes are 
removed from the schema. 
 
You mentioned changing the item ids to a number type - is there a 
chance that the journal lookup is failing because the numeric id isn't 
matching the old string id in the journal?