Reading this, the thing that stuck out to me was how remarkably lucky they were to have the two snapshots. The one from 6 hours earlier was there seemingly by chance, as an engineer had created it for unrelated reasons. And for both the 6- and 24-hour snapshots, it seems just lucky that neither had any breaking changes made to them by pre-production code (they _were_ dev/staging snapshots, after all).

I'm glad it all worked out in the end!