Thanks very much for the reply Han Shi. It is interesting what you say about COPY command's internal checks on the data. I'm using ROBOCOPY and hopefully the level of comparison and checking is high with this utility(?)

I would like to have the environment whereby I could do a full restore of all backups for validation and I totally take your point that this is the only way to be 100% sure that you will be able to recover data.

If, though, you were copying backup files (but not able to perform a full recovery check) would you say it was good practice to always verify your backups on the final storage destination device due to the possibility of corruption creeping in during the copy process? Or is the chance of corruption from a copy so slim that most DBAs faced with this would not feel the need to verify after a copy?

Thanks again for your knowledge and your take on this,

Dave.