Naturally when there’s a failure, there are questions about High Availability solutions. If the customer has an Availability Group, maybe they’ve avoided an outage completely – the primary fails over to the secondary, and the race starts to get the original machine back in case another failure (on the new primary) happens. Those situations aren’t the ones that keep coming back to mind, but are still stressful for the temporary loss of the safety net.
The bigger issues are when there is no quick failover available. About thirty years ago, I was dealing with a SQL Server 6.0 environment, where the customer’s DBA was cycling tapes (yes, tapes) for differential backups, except that he’d reused the tape that the full backup was on. When that system went down, I had a quick and harsh introduction to salvaging files off the disks from a failed computer. Fun times.
Also, it sounds like Rob’s surgery from last month has gone well, so hopefully he remains on the road to recovery.