I also want to point out that your question is not dumb at all, in my previous company we were 7 admins with root access + the process who was doing the updates of sensitive data files. There were moments that we had to edit the file manually, and, fortunately, we had the possibility to rewrite the deamon to accept responces that the files is inaccessible now, and batch the data for later insertion. That's why the question is not stupid, instead may turn into headache.