I've worked in an institution for which I rewrote a public facing database to replace their old and clunky system. I had numerous emails with them to transition

I've worked in an institution for which I rewrote a public facing database to replace their old and clunky system. I had numerous emails with them to transition smoothly between the old and the new system, and the last step was for them to give me the latest snapshot of the MSSQL db that would allow me to import the last two weeks of data entry. Scripts were ready, so the down time would be 10 min which was totally acceptable for that tool. That's when I realize the backup was two weeks old, that they had already deleted the machine as soon as the transition started (against our plan), and that the automated backups at the scale of the university had not been working for months (they realized it because of this incident)...