I'm late to the party, but he mentioned this in the article. The new server didn't have enough space to hold both the backup and the newly restored database, so

I'm late to the party, but he mentioned this in the article. The new server didn't have enough space to hold both the backup and the newly restored database, so that approach didn't work. Quote: "We’re a very lean shop when it comes to hardware, and this is by far our largest chunk of data we have to store, so there wasn’t a place anywhere on the network to store a 33-38TB full backup temporarily, while it was being restored to a server." As others have mentioned in the thread, a lot of the problems seem to have been solvable by just buying/attaching more storage, even if only temporarily.