Unfortunately - lots of people who are verrrrry careful about making their backups never check to see whether they can actually restore anything from them. Might as well use the WOM.

I've seen some very embarassed sys admins at at least 3 "big name" companies who discovered it was a one way alley a little too late.

A more common problem for us little guys is that many of the "backup" methods are bulk jobs, and you can't easily restore just a few files. You have to put the whole batch back, and then throw out what you didn't want. There's often not enough room left to get it all back - unless you back up and remove other stuff to make space, restore the batch, throw away the crap, and then restore the stuff you had to move to restore the stuff... (am I going in circles here?)

I find CDs about as rational as anything, but I'm still looking for better. A CD file format a little more similar to hard drives would make it a lot easier; but I don't expect the whole industry to change - especially since the standards have been out of print for about n+3 decades now, so nobody really knows how they're supposed to work.

John