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I agree with you Madfish, and even more, I test it regular, if it works the first time that doesn't mean it will work forever as I found out just lately.
I make a regular backup of all my sites with phpmyadmin.
You have to look here what the limit is that can be restored. For instance : When your database is 25 Mb and the restore of your host is limited to 10 Mb, you have to split your backup into smaller parts.
Then I use the backup program of my hosts to make a backup of all the files, that's a tar.gz file. I don't do this often it's a 250 Mb file.
Normally I sync the sites with ftp.
At one of my own computers I have a mirror of all my sites running on xampp. The server has 4 hard disks with a raid 5.
I also make regular backups from my 'home' system with a backup program and with xcopy.
Overdone? No, my experience over the years is, that you have to do this, otherwise Murphy will get you