How to fix a hand-edited dynamic zone?

[William_D. Colburn]

While I was out sick a coworker hand edited a zone with dyanamic
updates.  When I got back the server returned SERVFAIL for any queries
to it.  I didn't know yet that it had been hand edited, so I did an rndc
freeze to look at the zone file, which claimed to have succeeded, but
didn't remove the journal file, so I wasn't sure it had.  I wasn't able
to thaw the zone (rndc: 'thaw' failed: out of range) so I removed the
zone file and the journal file and replaced them with an AXFR of the
zone from a slave server.  It all seemed to work.  I learned about the
hand edit later when I asked around what had happened.

What I want to know now: is there a better solution to that problem than
what I did?  Better practices for fixing that which I could have followed?

--Schlake
  Sysadmin IV, NRAO
  Work: 575-835-7281 (BACK IN THE OFFICE!)
  Cell: 575-517-5668 (out of work hours)