First time posting one of my experiences here..
i was working in a call center company with around 500 operators, it was around 05pm when my co-worker John asked me:
"Hey.. is there any recent backup ?.. i just run a delete and forgot the where clause"..
Guess what table it was ? it was the NegotiationRules table.. the one that our behemoth system used for everything.. all managers rushed to our room because they had 500 operators doing nothing..
So i went to Matt our infrastructure guy that did the backup managment and such..
"Hey i need the backup of the database X, where is it? " -
Matt "Sorry.. we have no backups for each.. not enough space"..
Sooo great.. we had no backups or anything to recover.. then after some googling i found a tool to recover from the log files.. downloaded the trial version, and after some tests it looked like it could work.. however since it was trial.. it could only recover one record at time (click first record, get the insert to rollback, go to next).. obviously the company wont buy the full version (over 1000$).. so i download keytext (macro tool) and made a macro to click an item, get the sql to recover, copy in notepad, move next..
so now we headed to the server room to make a new backup and run this tool on the database to recover.. the server's HD was almost full.. the database was around 800gb, Matt was going to put a new hd in the server to make a new backup.. he connected the sata cable.. but there was no energy cable left to use.. he then opened another server plugged the energy cable from another server.. plugged the sata cable in the main server and started with the HD hanging between both servers..
and then finally the backup begins.. after a couple of hours the backup was done.. and then i run the tool to recover the log files.. took like 4 hours for the tool to find all lost entries, and then installed keytext on the server.. made it run to get all queries and finally managed to recover all entries after around 7 hours