I did it from the other side of the planet. I accidentally ran an rm -rf … command on a running system. Luckily I had an identical system running that I could use to copy over the files, devices, etc.
Learning about inodes and /proc/xxx/fd works, I was able to recover enough files to then copy over the rest from the other system.
Doing it over SSH from the other side of the world was a tough 14 hours.