why did i pick the profession that will have me near mental collapse after hours of fruitless troubleshooting, only to present the solution (which was me being less dumb) on a virtual silver platter, minutes after i start the next day

why did nobody warn me that this was a bad life choice

@ellotheth When you're forced to reverse engineer on-disk MySQL InnoDB data structures to recover client data and not get sued, you question **everything** that lead to that point. The RCA included "used Amazon Web Services". Actually, that was much of the RCA. Also: "used MySQL".