This is what I do. Using Amazon's EC2+EBS makes it dead simple. Every time we test a release I setup a staging env (from scratch) and restore the latest EBS sna

This is what I do. Using Amazon's EC2+EBS makes it dead simple. Every time we test a release I setup a staging env (from scratch) and restore the latest EBS snapshot. That way I'm testing both the database backup and that I've kept all of the server images up to date as well. It doesn't take much time either (about 30 minutes) and is done weekly.