Backup testing can be automated. I don't do this for my personal stuff, but at work there's a box that does a restore of our primary DB from backups, loads it into MySQL, and runs some smoke tests to make sure it looks roughly right. A quick script and a cronjob, and backups get tested every night.

I'm sure there's more thorough ways to do this kind of testing, but whatever level of confirmation you need automating it should be viable and then you only have to pay attention if/when something breaks.