All I'm saying is you don't really have a backup plan unless you have tested a disaster recovery restore. Believing the hype of the software and hardware companies is not a plan.
For home users you can live with backups of your documents and image files. For business servers, it can take days to reinstall and configure the OS if the restore software can't do it.
Absolutely. This is something I believe in strongly.
My favorite systems as far as disaster recovery was concerned were HP-3000 servers running MPE-V. All you needed to restore a box was the mag-tapes you created with backup. You could pop tape #1 on the tape drive, and boot the box, and it would completely restore everything and give you a brand new box. Sweet. Wish all backup programs worked that way. Boot and restore from media rocks!
Check out the new image backup software, they can even do reliable image backups of RAID while the server is still running these days. I've tried Symantec LiveState, UltraBack, and Acronis True Image, which is what I use on my most critical systems. A little more bleeding edge is the "universal restore" feature of these products, where you can restore to dissimilar hardware. That only seems to work about half the time, but when it matures it will be holy grail of restores. But of course, nothing beats having a perfectly matching piece of hardware sitting there ready to go if and when the need arrises. Just make sure you order them at the same time, because even though model numbers stay the same, internal components do not!