"Unfortunately, we backed up the servers between our 
    two servers."

It sounds like two servers ran the site and backups were jsut swapped between the two, that is a hackneyed setup.

Besides, all it takes is burning the backups to DVD once every blue moon to prevent massive data loss.

I don't want to sound callous, but just duplicating your data once does not constitute a sound backup strategy. You need snapshots and failover redundancy. It's good to have RAID 1 style redundancy for high availability, but if you or someone malicious writes bad data to your primary, you've hosed your backup as well.

They had some backups yes, but there is great room for improvement here.