Yes, but... This does nothing to protect against a bad cron job script. The web frontend, and even backend, are not linked to background maintenance tasks. A

Yes, but... This does nothing to protect against a bad cron job script. The web frontend, and even backend, are not linked to background maintenance tasks. And a field in a DB doesn't prevent a manual DB delete, or api call to a backing store. The real problem here, was a lack of backup testing / restore testing. If you have backups, you MUST manually verify they can be restored, in a desired state. And this means restores MUST be tested every time code changes happen, which effect backups.