One of the more fascinating aspects of human history is how much effort we're willing to devote to creating varied senses of safety, even if that safety is only an illusion.
Now, we can call this a failure of design, but really, people who rely on technology they don't understand can't be saved by good design. Sure, this particular case could be fixed by disallowing the recursive flag on the file system root, but safety is never going to be able to be the primary design concern of any technological system.
Imagine if a sword were made safety as first-class concern. You can't design a sword that can be used safely by the untrained. No weapon can be, training with a weapon is a prerequisite for safely using it. Similarly, every technology has to be understood by those using it. If you don't you're just inviting trouble.
For a business using technology, the needs are actually fairly straightforward. You need an understanding of what needs to be backed up, and a process for performing the backups. If you've picked the former right, (backing up human-readable information rather than data only readable by software programs that might go away in a crash) then risk is minimized.
Now, we can call this a failure of design, but really, people who rely on technology they don't understand can't be saved by good design. Sure, this particular case could be fixed by disallowing the recursive flag on the file system root, but safety is never going to be able to be the primary design concern of any technological system.
Imagine if a sword were made safety as first-class concern. You can't design a sword that can be used safely by the untrained. No weapon can be, training with a weapon is a prerequisite for safely using it. Similarly, every technology has to be understood by those using it. If you don't you're just inviting trouble.
For a business using technology, the needs are actually fairly straightforward. You need an understanding of what needs to be backed up, and a process for performing the backups. If you've picked the former right, (backing up human-readable information rather than data only readable by software programs that might go away in a crash) then risk is minimized.