Two wrongs can make a right
Alright, here's the scenario, we have several server farms, they go back decades and this has been passed down through the generations of teams with increasing amounts of duct tape and bubble gum. Every IT person's dream.
We also run backups, because we're not madmen, but we do it... poorly (see name of subreddit). Today, one of the production servers had half it's data wiped. No one knows how this happened but that's not relevant. To the backups! And... backup set one had nothing for this server, because the datastore was full and VEEAM couldn't take a snapshot (and had been reporting this but reading is for chumps). Not good, to backup set two! It... also has nothing because VEEAM couldn't take a snapshot and we rotate through these backup drives. Shit. To backup set 3! And this is where incompetence can sometimes be your salvation. By all rights we should've just lost it all then and there but... backup set 3 hasn't been able to take any backups since March because it was full this whole time. This means that the VEEAM error couldn't manifest and what did we find? A version of the prod server!
Yes, it's two months out of date but this data goes back decades so it's actually mostly fine!
Turns out, if you're incompetent enough it sometimes loops back around to genius.
Anyway... I'm gonna go have a heart attack elsewhere.