To be fair, my wife knows the root passwords on all my machines/servers incase I face an untimely death.

Hehehe, but I meant it literally too...

What if an admin dies? Should access to the servers die with him?

I would argue: no. So - in addition to your "mental illness" example - there are definitely reasons why several people should always know the root passwords to any servers (except of those which are so personal they actually should "die with their admins"... obviously...).

Every organization I've seen has disaster recovery procedures. Just follow them. The comments I made earlier about "terminating sysadmins" pertain to terminating those who don't follow them for one reason or the other. It really isn't a computer-science-specific problem, more like general organizational management problem.

With one man shops (like bitcointalk.org) the situation is simplified. Loss of access requires disassembly of the server to reset its password protections. If there was encryption in use, those data are (most likely) irretrievably lost and the server requires reinstallation with the fresh software. The reset/reimage is not something that can be done quickly, surreptitiously or socially-engineered into the normal workflow of the customer service of the data center. I've never heard of anyone successfully performing such an attack, but I've heard of performing similar attack where the goal wasn't to steal the data but to steal the hardware.

I personally wouldn't bother thinking much about it. In all cases that I've seen/experienced the password loss was temporary, i.e. the person recalled/found the proper password after giving it some time. The true loss happened only if there wasn't anything important on the server anyways.

The real, practical danger with one-man shops is not the password loss, but grave mistakes, that corrupt the data on the server without getting noticed.

I'm more of a small/middle-business person, so I can better understand the issues faced by small shops renting space in the data center cages.

How does the above DoD example compare with a personal web site for a porn-star/ex-model? How come a woman with incomplete high-school education can be astute enough to understand the issues of who can have access to database of her customers? Granted, she was about 40 y.o. at that time, but certainly wasn't a rocket-science intellect.