I cofounded a start up which was a call canter using software I wrote to manage maintenance at small pad retail sites such as fast food restaurants. We had inve

I cofounded a start up which was a call canter using software I wrote to manage maintenance at small pad retail sites such as fast food restaurants. We had investors. One showed up, a couple, who were extremely angry due to the repayment of their investment. It was a small building, but handled hundreds of calls per day, with 12 call-center reps. The investors were loud. At the same time, our database seemed to have locked up, it was on a Pyramid Unix server running Sybase, my choice. So I needed to address the stall, at the same being attacked with irate, high volume screaming, at me. While typing at my terminal, I accidentally "drop table"'d. I bricked the database and after 15 minutes on the phone with Sybase realized we had no choice but to restore from backup. That's when I found out from the tech in charge of backups that he had missed the last day. We lost 2 days of data and had to run with paper and pencil until we had the database up and working. So we restored what we had, and over the next 5 days, as people called in for status etc., we reconstructed most of what we had lost. The reps worked with the callers, and we worked things out over a week of 24-hour days. Embarrassing, but we lost zero customers. Unfortunately there were hundreds of small mishaps, and many unhappy people, but ultimately the business held on, went forward, and a few months later there was no lingering effect. Lesson: Don't let investors visit where the business is done, and verify your backups by restoring them. I recommend avoiding situations like this, but if one happens you can work it out with great effort, and it is rarely the end of the world.