Agreed. We have disaster recovery servers at my place and have to test the DR backups every few months to ensure we can restore our databases to the last night's backup ASAP. It's in a completely different location in case our building burns down or, as happened once, someone working on the road outside decides to cut through all our internet cables and force us offline for a few days.
Forcing yourself to go through the motions of a full restore on a test instance of your production server every once in a while is a great way to ensure you can rollback if tragedy strikes.
I'm glad Uncle E actually responded and seems OK, but nothing in that response puts my mind completely at rest about his business so I'll hang back and let other people be guinea pigs for a month or two while he sorts out trying to restore accounts.
I remember someone I used to work with telling me how when they worked in IT as a contractor and were approached to restore Small Company X's database, they arrived at the company and was told "we back up nightly, but the database is corrupted today and we can't find last night's files".
Asked how long the backup procedure took he was told "almost instantaneous".
He asked this guy to demonstrate what he did each night and the guy double-clicked the backup application shortcut then a dialog box appeared that said something like "No drive found, please reconfigure". Then he dismisses the dialog and says "Yeah it's been saying that for two years, since we did the database upgrade, but seems to be OK afterwards".
They also had no backup younger than 2 years old.