Sounds like you're off to a good start! :) Getting everything backed up soon is important; if things were implemented marginally, you don't know how long it will run before something crashes or hardware dies. Without a backup, you could then be in a rough spot... Also make sure that you test out the recovery from backup. I think documenting as you go is a great step, and is an easy way to generate a regular status report to show your boss what you've accomplished. You might want to start looking into the hardware that the systems are running on; are they working reliably, is there any redundancy (RAID, multiple servers, etc) and/or spare parts available. Once things are stabilized, I would continue refactoring the databases without making any user-visible changes (besides the improved performance once indexes are added :) Good luck!