Excellent point on checking ability to restore.

I started as IS manager at a company some years back and asked what they had for backup and restore procedures.

The VP of Sales (also their "Techie") promptly informed that they knew they had good backups because they hadn't gotten any error messages on their backup runs for over 6 months.

This was particularly odd to me when I noticed the dust on the backup tape that was in the drive. It looked like it had been in the machine 6 months itself.

A check in the backup logs indicated that last successful run was also over 6 months in the past, due to a dead drive.

We quickly replaced the drive, did backups, and tested restores.

I still haven't figured out how they managed to be so lucky that they made it 6 months without someone wanting at least a minor file restored.