Disaster recovery is easy to put off forever because you don't need it until you do. When it happens it can also kill off your company.

I've been involved in companies that went 14 years without a disaster. Another company I was involved with had 2 in a span of 2 months, each taking between 2 and 3 days to recover from.

Regardless of whether I need it or not, I sleep better at night knowing a decent plan is in place. Which means I can perform better during the day.

Yeah, but was it your choice of DB that killed you or something else? That something else is always more likely to happen and more dangerous than 'oh noes all my data is gone stupid mongo/couch!' as if that ever really happens.

Granted, I was making some assumptions about the original post. For me it's not about the choice of DB, it's about having the proper knowledge, time, and team to be able to setup a production environment that isn't seriously flawed in one or more ways.

I would need a hell of a lot more than a time savings of 1-2 days to add a whole new database technology to my production environment. Even if I know the tech the installation, configuration, automated backups, and automated validation of backups will likely consume more than 1-2 days to get setup. Then add on the learning curve aspect if I've never used it in a real production environment. Then add on the learning curve for any team members who might not be familiar with it.

Weeks, maybe. A day or two: not worth it.

Well, what about other value besides time, which is pretty subjective to begin with, and it doesn't really matter anyway. Like maybe more robustness, bigger dev communities, one of your team members is an expert and can do this quickly, etc.

I think if your architecture is likely to collapse when you shop around for databases, then you built the whole thing wrong to begin with.