I just keep repeating the mantra "no one has ever lost their job for failing to take a backup, only for failing to recover the application to the required state". I was caught recently where some backups from last year were needed to argue a legal case. The infrastructure team guaranteed that they had the data and went and ordered the relevant tapes from the off site storage. Low and behold all of the tapes were corrupt so there were no available back ups to restore. But that didn't frighten the infrastructure team into checking all other tapes, I had to force them via their manager and yes more and more of the tapes were found to be faulty, even though the back up software issued a "verified" status after the backup.

Always test your restores on a regular basis, and not just the local backups but also any business critical off site backups.