I would disagree -- the more years I spend programming the less I remember about system administration. I can do basic setup tasks, but fiddling with Active Directories and stuff like that is beyond what I care to learn and has been for what, a decade now?

At an Ancient Telecom company most folks don't have admin rights (and shouldn't) but there is an exception process developers follow, and otherwise the Company-approved packages don't need admin rights to install, plus the help desk has powers.

Better yet ... get two inexpensive USB disks, and swap them every day or two, maybe even have the inactive one in a separate location...

I had a power dip once, and none of my CyberPower or Best UPSs (or even the cheap no-name ones) had any trouble with it -- I didn't even see a surge in the lights, just that dip. Nonetheless, something started burning in my APC UPS and I had to trash it. Needless to say, no equipment was harmed other than the one piece which harmed itself.

So ... umm, if Maxtor and Seagate are now the same, and WD is also on your crap list, and certainly we've had "Deathstar" issues on several models of IBM-now-Hitachi drives, who's left for you to buy from? Samsung?

There are so many compromises that only need account access, that if you give someone an account you may as well give them root if they're malicious. So "If you know what you're doing and you don't run as Administrator all the time, you don't need AV anyhow." doesn't cut it in my book.

Backing up a live database is tricky for you. It is easy as pie for a vaguely adequate database. It will dump the dataspace then the transaction logs, and on reload it will replay the transaction logs up to the last committed checkpoint.

Someone else pointed out that replicas don't protect you from malicious alterations of the master (and someone who can crack the master can crack the replicas too) but I like hot replication for failover purposes (and spreading high-CPU/low-cacheability OLTP loads) and actual external dumps that spool off to tapes that go offsite for protection against data corruption.

Amen to this -- at Fermilab we had a setup with lots of 8mm tapes, and we thought the MTBF was awfully high (several were failing each week), much more than the 30,000 hour MTBF specified...until we realized it was 30,000 hours with a 5% duty cycle, or 600 hours of use. 600 hours divided by even a dozen tapes is 50 hours, about 6 8-hour days and these were in use up to 24x6... The system also let us empirically confirm the single-bit error rate of DRAM, something on the order of 1 in 10^13 bits at the time.

Hot spare, hot swap, hot plug...that's how you gotta do it when you have so much hardware on hand that failures need to be planned for rather than prevented.