Richard supplied a great "horse before the cart" post, but I think there is
substantial merit in the notion of "verification of backups", especially if
this means "enhancing the chance for rapid and complete restores, without
surprise, to meet operational objectives".

*SM, by itself, is inadequate to ensure "verification of backups", IMHO.

I'm reminded of incidents with three of my clients in my early days with
ADSM.

A Netware administrator approached me asking if his backups were up-to-
date. I looked (on the backup server) at his file systems and saw each was
recently backed up without error.  I responded "Yes!".  I was wrong. The
Netware administrator had just experienced a disk crash and couldn't
restore the file system.  It hadn't been backed up.  His predecessor had
coded a DOMAIN statement in DSM.OPT (necessary at the time to stop backup
of file systems that shouldn't be backed up) and when a new disk and file
system was added, the DSM.OPT file was not adjusted.

A Windows desktop client approached me with help in restoring his PIM's
data base file.  He'd received my weekly automatic e-mail suggesting that
his file systems were backed up successfully, but couldn't find his PIM's
data base file for restore.  It wasn't backed up.  He had not viewed his
DSMSCHED.LOG file since installing his PIM, else he would have seen that
ADSM could not read his PIM data base file, since the PIM had an exclusive
lock on it.  A single file failure was not part of what I could then see at
the backup server.

Another desktop client approached me asking why he couldn't restore a file
that was on his machine the previous week, but inadvertently erased. The
reason was that he had decided to conserve power and turn his machine off
each night (during his backup window!).  My weekly e-mail reminder would
have pointed out the problem, but it wouldn't be generated until the next
day ... not that it would have helped: he filtered it into a folder that he
rarely viewed.

So, I very much prefer and encourage "user verification of backups".  The
user (the *SM client) often have an understanding of the importance of
their data.  *SM information at the backup server to "verify backups" has
increased over time, but wrt verification of backups, I am merely a
supporter, as the "buck stops here" at the data owner (*SM client user).

Hope this helps,

Wayne T. Smith                          ADSM AT Maine DOT edu
ADSM Technical Coordinator - UNET       University of Maine System