Ext3 and write caching by drives are the data killers...

True, but it would be good if there was something simple like "apt-get install data-integrity" in major distros, which would then help the user configure the system for high integrity by default and this was well publicised. This could include things like: disabling write cache, periodic fsck's, ext3 data=journal, etc.

It would still be better if distros made this the default but I don't see much prospect of this.

One other example of disregard for data integrity that I've noticed is that Ubuntu (and probably Debian) won't fsck a filesystem (including root!) if the system is on batteries. This is very dubious - the fsck might exhaust the battery, but the user might well prefer a while without use of their laptop due to no battery to a long time without use of their valuable data when the system gets corrupted later on...

Fortunately on my desktop with a UPS, on_ac_power returns 255 which counts as 'not on battery' for the /etc/init.d/check*.sh scripts.