In past jobs, there were many situations where the business wanted to know the data behind a report that was produced on a certain day in the past, maybe even a year or more in the past, and the database they were using for reporting purposes simply didn't have any data change capture, versioning, or online archiving capability. Sometimes this request was the result of an internal or external audit. For this reason, they would request a restore to a staging environment that was as close as possible to the time the report in question was produced. This scenario was far more common than restoring for the purpose of disaster recovery, and every DBA needs to have a plan in place to facilitate it.

If an organization has something like a month end or other periodic cycle, then for backups older than three years, they should at least retain a backup that correlates to each reporting period. Also, if they are in the business of publishing reports for external consumption, then they need to archive the data used to produce those reports.