Another thing to chew on if we are talking about people with dedicated servers - backing up your data is one thing, but anyone backing up /etc or /usr ? A fried hard drive can be replaced and your data put back on from backup, but what about all those config files? Those custom software installations? All those patches? Are sure the version of gzip that is currently on your server HD is the same as the gzip that was present when the drive was setup? Maybe it got updated during the time you have been on the server? If so, your backups may not unzip properly...
It really is an absolute nightmare recovering from a fried harddrive and will take at least 48h of hard work getting a server back to its original configuration...
even if your server is fully managed, your server admin does not make custom images of your HD to restore the drive to its original state minus your data. It needs to be restored using the OS image then repatching then applying all the apache/php/mysql/etc configs then reinstalling any extra software that was there before you can re-apply your data. It's maybe not you that does it, but it takes time and all the while, your server is not live...
I'm not scaremonguering, just giving a heads-up. I would say that around a third of people think they are safe with their backups, but a backup is only good if it can be restored successfully - have you ever tried restoring your backup to make sure it's good?
