[development] drupal and recovering from errors

Hi all, I'm doing a master in communications and had a lot of courses on usability. A feature that keeps coming up in most of the heuristics is the ability to recover from errors. I've googled (a bit) on the topic and haven't found much yet, so I was wondering if there are existing modules or practices ? I guess a lot of people deal with this through database backups and restore nodes from there. I can also imagine that developers have their own system as for example letting content managers unpublish but not delete. Any other ideas, suggestions ? HnLn