The old approach to rollback planning: document a procedure, put it in the migration plan, and hope nobody ever needs it.

That worked when cutover windows were long enough to fix problems forward. Most issues could be patched in place before business impact became unacceptable.

That window has shrunk. Business tolerance for disruption is lower. Environments are complex enough that fixing forward at 2am — when something breaks mid-cutover — isn’t always an option.

A rollback plan that hasn’t been tested isn’t a plan. It’s an estimate. And the number that matters isn’t how long you think rollback takes — it’s how long it actually takes, measured against the point where business impact becomes unacceptable. If you don’t know that number before the cutover window opens, you don’t know if rollback is a real option.

The difference between a rollback plan on paper and one you’ve actually run is the difference between having an option and believing you have one.

Have you ever had to execute a rollback mid-migration — and did the plan hold when it mattered?

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