Excellent article as usual Grant!

I think the best part is the advice to practice the recovery steps when you're not under the cosh.  In fact I would recommend that all production DBAs do this at least once a week because:

a) You are absolutely, 100% proving that your backups are working and can be used.  Backups are meaningless until it can be proved that they can be recovered from in the event of a disaster.  By doing a test recovery once a week you are ensuring that everything is still as it should be.  I worked at a company where they had set up an excellent backup plan but, somehow, the incremental backup job got disabled and it wasn't noticed until, you guessed it, it was needed to get the company system back online!  The DBA and the company went their separate ways.

b) For the reason that Grant stated - you will be familiar with the steps involved.  Doing this once a week burns this knowledge into your brain. Practice, practice, practice.

If you're in a team then this shouldn't be too arduous and should be cycled round the team making sure that everyone knows how to do it without having to think about it.

Malc