&gt; Well, for one thing, you must always remember the immortal words, DON&#x27;T PANIC<p>So true. A colleague of mine managed - on his second or third day on job - to delete every single user account in our Active Directory. After an hour, we gave up trying to restore the AD (it was an SBS2008, so no AD recycle bin) and simply restored the entire DC (at the time, our domain only had the one DC) from backup. Surprisingly, most of our users took it very well and used the time to get some paperwork done or clean up their desks or something like that. Still, it was one of the most stressful days of my life. So we kind of panicked. In restrospect, I think another hour or so of research might have saved us the eight hours of restoring that server (did I mention that our backup infrastructure really, really sucked at the time?).<p>In smaller desasters, I&#x27;ve found the ability to remain calm most valuable, though. Having your boss breathing down your neck impatiently can instill a deep desire to simply do <i>something</i> just to show that you are working on the problem. But if you don&#x27;t understand what&#x27;s wrong, at best you are wasting time, and possibly making the problem even worse.