Several support incidents taught me the same hard lesson: when data is at risk, the first priority is preserving the data, not troubleshooting.
Recovery process
- Stop making changes.
- Create backups before touching anything.
- Preserve evidence (logs, exact state).
- Verify storage health.
- Verify database integrity.
- Recover first, optimize later.
Why the order is strict
Every well-intentioned "quick fix" applied before a backup is a chance to turn a recoverable incident into permanent data loss. Discipline beats cleverness here.