[inflatableDodo]

>'If you are not careful you can rip the metal off the circuit board, and if that happens, there is very little you will be able to do to fix that.'

I've done that before, managed to fix it with silver based conductive paint.

[asteli]

One can also scrape the soldermask off of the nearest segment of the trace that got broken and jumper to it. It's easy to pull up traces on accident but it's uncommon for that trace adhesion failure to cause the nearest IC pin or via to fail as well.

[adammunich]

Much harder to do with buried vias :-)