[portentint]

One of my team accidentally deleted a client database, years ago.

I found out there were no backups.

The team member who deleted the db was completely stressed, of course. But my real anger was at the team's total failure to ensure we were running backups. Are you kidding me? If it wasn't someone clicking 'delete' by accident, it would've been a hard drive failure, or a power outage, or something similar.

And eventually I realized the blame lay with me. I was ultimately responsible for our backup plans, etc. - I hadn't given someone a clear direction regarding failover, redundancy, backups or security. I fixed it.

You told the story extremely well, and you handled it beautifully. There's no way anyone at that company had a right to blame you, or be angry at you, aside from the initial "WTF?!!!" reaction we'd all have.

Saying "You're lucky you're still here"...

The person who should've left was the CEO, not you.