Why is it that we tell our customers how to do disaster recovery, be we don't quite do it right ourselves?
As an independent I make frequent backups of my work (CD, USB Drive, and sometimes both). I had installed Vista on my HP laptop, but for business reasons, I needed to roll it back to Windows XP. My backup came in extremely handy here--and worked well. Well enough, I consider myself lucky. That was a planned backup and restore.
Then my TabletPC somehow got crunched. Things didn't go nearly as smoothly for the restore on this baby. I am working on my third attempt at recovering the files, and felt I had some time to make a point about testing backups.
I see this all the time. You make the backup, rotate the tapes, store them offsite in a locked fireproof cabinet, yadda, yadda, yadda. But did anyone ever test a restore? Did you ever figure out what it is going to take to get the data back? Did you ever figure out how long it was going to take to get back? Unless you like loading software (which I absolutely abhor) these are things you should test. Stop reading and go do it now...