Oh man I had a project similar to this recently. My team got hired to document this fairly large database (800+ tables, 2000+ SPs). We decided to use a product

Oh man I had a project similar to this recently. My team got hired to document this fairly large database (800+ tables, 2000+ SPs). We decided to use a product that actually writes the documentation to the DB as extended properties. The client specifically did not want us to use dev for this, so they put us in test. Immediately this raised some warning bells in my mind so I let them know that risks regarding what could happen if they move from dev to test without notifying me (if I'm notified, I can script out the extended properties and reapply them to the test after the migration is complete). We're about 2 months in and 90% complete. One morning, ops decides to migrate to test and doesn't let me know. One of my team members logs into the system and tells me that everything has disappeared. At this point, I'm sweating bullets and I'm pretty sure that I'm going to be in some tough conference calls the next couple of days. It's a fixed fee project with a client that we have a really good relationship with and I don't want to be the one that destroys it. After about 15 minutes of pondering my demise and hoping that they back-up the test environment, I get notified from the ops team that they create back ups weekly and test monthly for all environments. Luckily for me, this was a Monday morning so we lost maybe a few hours of work. That being said, that was a very stressful 15 minutes and taught me how important it is to: 1) Back-up every environment - storage is cheap and labor often isn't. Having to recreate work would have been way more expensive than having the systems in place to save the potential lost work. Additionally, you never know what data might be lost during testing or work done in test that you really wish you could retrieve. 2) Test your DR processes - their recovery was smooth and well executed and we had reasonable assurance it would work.