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!
I hate to mention this in a Windows hating community, but the Windows Server ASR backup works like a charm. You can always boot with a Windows CD, and then all you need is the ASR floppy that has your disk configuration, and your backup media, whether tape or external hard disk.