I agree with this. Prepare for destroyed (burnt-down level) machine, for datacentre failure, for stolen home server, for scratched blu-ray archives - in short, for the worst. And of course, hope for the best.

It's easier said than done in some companies where stake holders are always pushing for new stuff.

Unless those who fund what you're doing understand why disaster recovery is vital, you're going to see this.

Ideally you want devops in such a state that you create new lower environments that mirror production, complete with state/backup restoration, that's run automatically every week.