The backup thing is critical... I once had a client who's tape backup drive died. He was out of town, I was busy with other clients and it was a Fri. I said let's deal with it on Monday. Monday comes around and the secretary calls me and says the server is locked up. I walk her through a hard reboot... then hard disk DOA, as in "no bootable drive found", no partition, no files. My heart sank. Even worse the tape drive that died had not written a usable backup in weeks even though the logs reported no errors. The best tape we had was 2 months old, not much use but better than nothing. Fortunately, the data recovery firm was able to get the data off the old hard disk but it cost the company about $3K.
Another good rule... if you inherit a new customer you need to "trust but verify" the previous tech's work. I warn my new clients about the added costs of checking and learning a new setup. I learned this one the hard way when a new client had a decent tape backup program in place but I never did a test restore. One day they needed some deleted files restored and was shocked to learn that the previous tech had inadvertantly selected the option to backup the directory structure only! No files in piles of tapes, just folders. Yikes!
Another good rule... if you inherit a new customer you need to "trust but verify" the previous tech's work. I warn my new clients about the added costs of checking and learning a new setup. I learned this one the hard way when a new client had a decent tape backup program in place but I never did a test restore. One day they needed some deleted files restored and was shocked to learn that the previous tech had inadvertantly selected the option to backup the directory structure only! No files in piles of tapes, just folders. Yikes!