I am not employed by Elgg, Curverider, or any organization connected with them. The "we" here means the core developers. I've handled most of the development on 1.7.2 but I don't make the decisions regarding the actual release schedule. Sorry - no inside information here...

So you aren't employed by Elgg or Curverider, but you've done most of the development on 1.7.2? How does that work exactly?

I was heavily involved in reporting bugs to Elgg's bug tracker (http://trac.elgg.org/). I eventually submitted so many bugs on Elgg's web services API that Brett asked me to handle fixing it. From there, I moved on to fixing other parts of the core. The typical pattern for open source projects is that a new developer gets active in the forums, writing documentation, submitting bugs and then moves up over time to submitting patches, svn commit privileges, and planning future versions.

It used to be that I would fix a bug in my local repository of Elgg but it wouldn't be fixed in core. The next time Elgg released a new version, I would have to integrate all my bug fixes al over again. Waste of time. By submitting bug reports, patches, or fixing the issue in Elgg's repository, the bugs get fixed upstream which makes me more productive. Not only that, but all the other developers using Elgg don't have to work around the same bugs which makes them more productive and that means more and better plugins for everyone. When people get involved there is a multiplier effect.

The Elgg data directory is located outside your root folder. Make sure that, the name of the directory is same. If the files are uploaded, then they should be inside the data directory. There is no location in Elgg for filestorage, other than the data directory.

Well I checked... is nothing on data directory or at least I can't see anything

also seems like I can't open some users files(maybe is a file ownership problem and mess thing up?)... maybe the server isn't configured correctly?(on the old server and the new one the data directory looks the same)

Problem solved for the next backup. My server seems to a have a file ownership problem and can't backup files which are marked on elgg as private. For that I recommend you to use elggbackup plugin. In case someone else have the same problem and find this post.