I was privy to one of the most catastrophic data losses ever. During a rather uninteresting database outage, a rogue Unix admin restored old data over new data, about 7 tbs, at a well know aircraft manufacturer. Totally corrupted the backups. The business was down for two weeks until we found an image that could be rolled forward with incremental backups. My contribution was saying, Greg don’t do it!
The root cause was that Greg had control over backups, disk allocation and Unix. There were no checks on his power. When I stepped into the breached I insisted that backups and disk were assigned to their proper groups. I took care of Unix.
Poor Greg died of a heart attack while still a fairly young man. He always wanted to be seen as the golden knight who rode in to save the damsel in distress. In reality, he was the worse lead Unix admin ever who became mad by root authority.