Ah, I remember being called away from my new year holiday when an engineer dropped our entire database.
This happened because they didn't realise they were connected to the production database (rather than their local dev instance). We were a business intelligence company, so that data was vital. Luckily we had a analysis cluster we could restore from, but afterwards I ensured that backups were happening... never again.
(Why were the backups not already set up? Because they were not trivial due to the size of the cluster and having only been CTO for a few months there was a long list of things that were urgently needed)
This brings to mind on of my common responses: if it's not important enough to back up - it's not important!
It may be expensive, either in complexity, costs of storage/services, etc, but it's a necessity.
I'm curious about many of the comments in this thread - why are people logging in as table owners? It's not too difficult (for talented data-driven companies) to create roles or accounts that, while powerful, still make it difficult to drop a table and such.
This happened because they didn't realise they were connected to the production database (rather than their local dev instance). We were a business intelligence company, so that data was vital. Luckily we had a analysis cluster we could restore from, but afterwards I ensured that backups were happening... never again.
(Why were the backups not already set up? Because they were not trivial due to the size of the cluster and having only been CTO for a few months there was a long list of things that were urgently needed)