Outside of keeping the farm running properly through monitoring, the other major priority for a Farm Administrator should be ensuring that there is a proper backup of the organization's farm. A SharePoint 2010 farm can consist of many components, some of which have dependencies on others.
The state service is a good example of a service application that other components rely on, whereas the user profile service is another. These components must be backed up properly, in order to have a fully functioning farm, operating with integrity, when doing a restore such as in the case of a disaster recovery.
A SharePoint 2010 administrator should know and understand what the different components are and what is installed. Only with this knowledge can they understand the ramifications of when to schedule backups and how often and which components need to be backed up more often than others.
Here are some of the SharePoint 2010 assets that should be considered...
