In this latest upgrade I've lost all the photo descriptions, album names, album descriptions and comments. I saved everything to my local machine before the upgrade figuring I could copy it back over if something went wrong. Problem is I can't find a file with any these descriptions/data. Do these files exist? If not can I copy the entire backed-up gallery from my local machine back to the server and will it work then?
I think I went from 1.2.6 to 1.2.9.
Help? Thanks in advance.

The answer is backup up the SQL from your server/hosting site. Luckily I still have that and should be able to fix this somehow. I don't know why I didn't remember that all that information is stored in SQL database, I guess it's because I set all that up a while back and everything is done through the kick-butt admin interface. I just figured it must be in one of those hundreds of files.
Moral of my story: Figure out how to backup up your SQL before any upgrades. If you don't know call your hosting service. The upgrade instructions clearly say backup but all I did at first was copy all the files over. Duh. We'll I've upgraded twice before and this time something messed up but luckily I felt something was wrong and made a new database. So. Best to all.

There is a backup utility in Zenphoto. You should always run that before an upgrade.