@DR

The fact that one of your steps is 'put tape in drive' suggests that you've never really used anything like a big backup system. There are machines that do that now you know?

As with all storage, if you want an estimate of how much something will cost, think of a number, then add a zero, two if you need it quickly.

@DR - Data Restores

I can quite see how the bills rack up, the problem here, according to the company was that the engineer "caused damage by impairing the integrity and availability of data,", a DR policy would be fine for backup and restore, providing you know that something's amiss. The odd changed value in a data stream may be undetected for years, but may have a huge impact, at which point you need to start referring to data that was backed up a long time ago.

On affecting the availability, if an oil company cannot reliably collect safety data from a remote plant, that plant must be shut down to ensure no issues occur. A non-functioning plant can cost thousands of pounds a minute in lost production.

With the guy being an ex-networks engineer, he could have quite easily changed the configuration of a network router, and taken down both their network and voice comms. Try getting something fixed quickly when you have no access to the site, aren't quite sure what the problem is, and only have a sat-phone to talk to a non-IT person on site.