Trust but verify. As a developer it doesn't matter what sysadmins or anyone else says about backups of your data; if you haven't run your DR plan and verified the results, it doesn't exist.

One of the things I'm still extremely grateful for is that I learnt the basics of computer science from an ex-oracle guy turned secondary school teacher, who wasn't the best programmer let's say but who absolutely drilled into us (I was probably the only one listening but still) the importance of code quality, backups, information security etc.

Nothing fancy, but it's the kind of bread and butter intuition you need to avoid walking straight off a cliff.

He also let me sit at the back writing a compiler instead of learning VB.Net, top dude

what do we do? Well for starters don't rely on a single geographic location chuckles