A little operational maturity goes a long way. If you're following MOF or ITIL, you're already keeping track of all these "little" details and should be able to reconstruct your environment from the logs to line up with those backups.

Having years and years of backups is a start, but...

That said, I don't think I've ever seen an operational shop (even in large enterprises) above a maturity level of ~2.5.