Well, not recent, but a few years ago I deleted the production database of my fathers rental company (whoops). The (manual) backup was a week old. Luckily, all data was still there, but on paper (all signed contracts) so I worked overnight to restore all data from the paper pile.
After this, I built a script that did a backup once a day and made sure I had to go through some extra hoops to connect to the production database from my own dev machine.
After this, I built a script that did a backup once a day and made sure I had to go through some extra hoops to connect to the production database from my own dev machine.
All in all, this was a good learning experience.