Verifying backups is almost always many times more difficult than setting up the backups themselves. Checking that replication was in fact working turned out to be fairly easy to automate (although, short of checksumming all the records in all the tables you can't really be 100% sure everything is okay).

That's the thing with backups, they can fail or become corrupt in many ways. If you don't use them for something on a regular basis or have some regular verification process you may not know what you have until it's too late.

And, of course, I've also seen situations where subtle data corruption in the master database leads to weeks of subtly corrupt backups. By the time the corruption was discovered we faced the choice of rolling back several weeks to the last good backup or fixing the corruption. In the end we had to do a kind of merge -- it was a real pain.