Re: there but for the grace of God...
"Some of us make sure there are backups and was know that RAID6 is required for SATA disks. "
Nothing to do with SATA and everything to do with size. I've had TB-scale raid6 arrays of UW-scsi disks go titsup during a rebuild cycle and been very glad of the nightly backups.
FWIW, even RAID6 is not good enough once you get past 10TB or so. Whilst there's no "Official" term for 3 drive redundancy (other than RAID-Z3 for ZFS), people are referring to it as RAID7
And of course none of your raid counts for the pimple on a baboon's arse if someone goes "rm -rf" in the wrong location, which is a more important reason why backups are important than the risk of hardware failure - and why "backups" are _NOT_ extra storage arrays attached to your main data store
Hint: If your data isn't in 2 distinct locations then it's not backed up, and a replicated server, or another array on the same box is not "2 locations" for this purpose.
Then there're the issues of:
Ensuring that what you back up can actually be restored (no brainer).
That you're backing up what you're supposed to be backing up ("ooops, you never asked for that dataset to be added to the backups", or "You want a restoration. Of a dataset that you refused to sign off on being backed up because that cost too much. I suggest you try a seance")
That you keep them around long enough ("What do you mean you want a file restored from 3 years ago? We only keep them 12 months!" - this happens regularly despite telling people the time limits form the outset)
AND that what's being backed up isn't random garbage thanks to some memory error scribbling all over the storage 6 months ago ("Well we restored it, but it's random gibberish. Looks to have been been like that on the original disks for the last 2 years" - real world example, 1999)
So yeah, RAID and backups are important, but so is testing that everything works/is correct.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that KCL's ISD have been fighting for decent budget for years. The attitude from academics is that they know it all and everything can be done with desktop PC class hardware. A couple of £2k bills for restoring fried HDDs that weren't backed up, or £500k bills for rerunning data analyses that they didn't think were important don't even seem to drive the lesson home
(Finding out that the data "we don't need to backup because we can re-download it" is either no longer available or will take 3 months to stream in doesn't seem to sink in either.)