The best thing I can say is: "Make Multiple Copies".

This is why I always make sure I have at least 2 copies of my next longest 
retention before expiring the shorter retention(S).

For example:

If you do weekly full backups, keep you're daily incremental backups for at 
least 2 weeks.
In turn, if you're monthly backups have a longer retention, keep your weekly 
full backups for at least 2 months.

Even if you verify the tape using a restore to be absolutely certain, that tape 
will eventually deteriorate, and could potentially get damaged.  Any kind of 
electronic media is far from indestructible.

If you truly paranoid, don't rely on your backup system as your only point of 
recovery.  Backup systems should be first and foremost designed for disaster 
recovery (although if you have the funds replication works even better), and 
secondarily for long term legal and archival purposes, and lastly as an 
operational recovery mechanism.  There are much better ways to insure 
operational recovery (i.e. versioning filesystems) if you are truly that 
paranoid.

I'm not saying your backup system can't do all three, and do them very well, 
but there are other methods that work better for giving your management the 
warm fuzzy they are looking for.  Of course if all they really want is a warm 
fuzzy, just find some marketing documents that say the likely hood of a problem 
is extremely low (there are plenty of them out there).

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