Our IT management has talked about "snap" capabilities with our Netapp disk device. This reminds me of my post the other day about "DBA - Phantom job title." It may just be what I'm seeing in my company ( ~300 employees), or perhaps a trend for smaller companies. That is, "DBA by committee" where the various duties a DBA or DBA-team would handle are parceled out to various people, including some who have little if any sql server knowledge.

As far as the implications for successful disaster recovery, the thing that works against us is how rarely you actually need to restore from whatever kind of backups you use. Add to that non-technical managers managing technical departments with a constant eye on the budget and where does it lead?

If you've already gone 5 years without ever having a need to restore due to failure or corruption, why bring a $75k+/year DBA into a group of employees who have already established work habits and turf to protect ( some of these have found DBAs to be what they consider a road-block to rapid development in the past.