As an aside, my hosting company accidentally deleted my backup share on their off-site SAN. I was not amused.
First rule of backups: trust nobody!
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There's an infinite variety of problems that can exist with backups. Back in the early eighties I had to restore a file from a backup that was more than a year old, but couldn't read the tape (even though it was the same drive that created the backup). We called in our Field Engineer and he hooked an oscilloscope up to the tape drive and adjusted it until we were finally able to read the tape. It took most of a day.
Backups almost seem to be a running joke. Whenever we've done a restore of a db from backup the plan is basically "try to restore from the latest backup, if that doesn't work, try the next latest one and so on until you find one that works".