[meesterdude]

Nobody ever checks their backups! This is such a great way to take care of it automatically.

I'm not at all against sanity checks, especially of something you trust will work when you need it to like backups. But what would cause a DB backup to the filesystem to fail? When they are/were stored on tape or other media, there is certainly the concern of media corruption. But when we're talking about files resting on disk, what would cause a backup to be corrupt or unusable? Certainly there is some expectation that mysql/psql can reliably dump a DB. Or is it purely for sleeping soundly at night?

[lloydpick]

We transfer our backups to S3, so there's always a chance that it could be corrupted during transfer, or that the compression could have failed before transfer.

It can also help catch operational changes, eg. someone changed the root password and updated the apps that depend upon it, but didn't adjust the backup scripts.