Real sys admins know this pain (rm suffers no fools) and accept the consequences of recovering from backups as pennance. No backups? Then you aren’t really a sys admin then, are you?

Once I had to restore an entire organization from shadow copies because the IT director didn’t believe in off-site backups or using endpoint protection. The whole network got a ransomware that included the backups, but did not include the shadow copies on the main file server.

Are shadow copies like snapshots?

Yes, they are essentially file snapshots. Shadow copies in a Microsoft environment at least are basically file history without using file history. So when you modify a file when it’s enabled, it makes a copy of the last version of the file.

But since it’s not meant to be a actual backup solution, it’s meant to be on a file-by-file basis. I think that means they had to go through and manual restore n a file by file basis

If I remember correctly, we were able to restore folders from the shadow copies. I certainly didn’t go file by file. I might have used a tool to do it. But as you pointed out, it’s not a proper backup so we had to do quite a bit of reconciliation to make sure we restored everything and document anything we couldn’t restore.