Among the other duties of life in the electronic fast lane, I'm the monkey that feeds the tapes into the machines.

I have also experienced reading log after log of successful backups with a redundant verification of what's on the tape only to find it lied when it came time to recover.  I long ago set up backups to first be copied to another drive and then to tape for both redundancy and speed of restores.

But, I am also now looking at a backup scheme using USB drives (becoming more inexpensive every day) for each server and actually swapping those out on some sort of schedule instead of tapes. Coupled with offsite backups either across the network or Internet, tapes just might be on the verge of being replaced.

And the monkey can find something else to do like read SQL forums...