Even with the best planning in the world, things go wrong and always at the most inconvenient moment.
Taking a proactive approach to disaster recovery with good planning and practice will highlight any problems at an early stage before it is too late. Verifying the integrity of system backups is only really possible by restoring them and checking that the restored system is fully operational.
You should ask yourself questions such as, "What actions are necessary if the remote server fails?" Do you repair the backup server first or switch to another server to reduce the size of the window without backups? If the mail server fails, are you familiar with the restoration procedures? Is replacement hardware available at short notice, for example, on a Sunday?
There are many horror stories of administrators diligently taking backups only to find that when required the backups are useless because of a tape drive error or a minor syntax error in the backup script that...