I am sorry to hear of your data loss. It is standard operating procedure at my company to always take a backup of any database, live or test, before making any changes; and to store the backup to a different server on the network. This is in addition to any regularly scheduled nightly backups. Then, every other weekend, we select a handful of databases in our backup sets to restore to a test server and verify our backups are good. This is all because we lost data several years back. Nothing teaches you paranoia more than data loss!

Jack