Week long networking outage. How can I make sure it doesn’t happen again

I’m new to the IT field. And of course mistakes come with being a newbie. I want to specialize in networking, I currently have a network+ and close to the CCNA R&S. I am also close to a Bachelors in networking and security.

I work as a IT Support Technician for a Small company and quickly took over the networking responsibilities of the department ( only two of us, me and my boss + I’ve been there about 7 months)

Over the past month we’ve been setting up and taking down locations, getting a lot of equipment that can be re-used.

Well last week I was asked to configure a firewall for a new site and to reuse one of the firewalls we just took offline.

ALMOST all our sites run through a VPN tunnel back to the main office.

Here’s where I made a mistake. when I plugged in the firewall to configure it, my laptop also connected to WiFi.

I configured the firewall, everything was all happy, when I get a call from one location saying the internet is down.

When I looked up the IP it was the SAME as the firewall I just configured. Instead of connecting to the firewall next to me, I changed the one 4 states away.

I immediately rushed to find a back up of the configuration to reimplement it and save me from my boss and the CEO.

After looking everywhere we had no back up of the firewall. I quickly scrambled to configure it back to the way it was but I had no record of what is down there, static IPs, VLANs, etc.

Over the next 4 days, with the help of my boss I was able to piece together the configuration. and get them back up and running. The VP of the region and and CEO hounded us the whole way.

The icing on the cake, was on Friday, when I found a recent back up of the firewall on a local hard drive and a place neither me nor my boss knew to look.

All I could do was laugh. I couldn’t believe it.

What steps should be taken to prevent this?

My thought was maybe a dedicated server for all configuration backups, we have almost 50 locations and barely half of them are backed up

We use sonic wall firewalls, is there a way to automate a back up every month?

Any advice is appreciated. Thanks!