Most backup systems allow you to explore backups and extract individual files. Testing a bunch of files for restoring is at least better than completely ignorin

Most backup systems allow you to explore backups and extract individual files. Testing a bunch of files for restoring is at least better than completely ignoring it.. however it's difficult if it turns out part of your backup is simply missing, maybe an erroneous exclusion entry or some path miss (happened to me, I was without backup for a home folder for a year before I noticed it, the /home/user/ was a symlink to another volume that mostly had tmp data and so wasn't backed up). You might not even notice this even if you restore the whole backup, because you can't really be expected to go through everything every time either..