The most important - and most forgotten/ignored - part of a good backup practice, is actually checking that you can restore the backup successfully. Ok, it's

The most important - and most forgotten/ignored - part of a good backup practice, is actually checking that you can restore the backup successfully. Ok, it's slightly less important than actually backing up at all in the first place, but only slightly. You won't believe just how many organisations will have an automated script for a daily/weekly/monthly rolling backup of their database, but won't have any procedure to restore the previous days database to check the backup procedure went ok! At the most basic, it's just another automated script on a spare box to ensure the restore returns ok. But people don't even bother with that...