I work for an office (not in IT) in a smallish county government in metro Atlanta and would be classified as an application manager, I suppose--our office has a couple of databases that I maintain that are absolutely essential to our business purposes. Backups are technically the responsibility of dba's in our IT Department and they do a fine job. But through the years I've come to discover a couple of simple truths about data: (1) nobody cares about YOUR data as much as YOU do and (2) a dba cannot be expected to understand the data as much as you the business user does. So I believe the business user should play a role in the backup process and not simply rely on the dba. That may mean learning to backup and restore data yourself so you can see the restored data and test it thoroughly to make sure the data looks okay.