I'm driving to work today and there's a car pulling out of the gas station and it looks like a parking gate is coming down next to it. I'm super confused then I realized this guy has hit a street sign! I then watched the guy back up and go out the other exit like no one was watching.
I circle back, take a look and chuckle to myself. Then I start thinking about where I see this happen with data. The amount of times I have seen customers lose an entire RAID set or have file system corruption or big things that were all scared of is pretty rare, maybe about a dozen times over about 19 years.
What I have seen a lot of is when data is missing and no one knows why. I suspect its like this guy at the gas station, realizing no ones here and just going to go the other way.
So how do you protect yourself for when someone makes a mistake and is afraid to say something and back away?
There's really good ways to do it but you have to plan for it. Talk about it with your team and figure out how you're protecting yourself from when someone deletes something and doesn't tell anybody.
You'll be more protected taking care of this then preparing for the big stuff that rarely happens.