Give me a break! (Hosting) companies will throw more references and specs at you than you know what to do with, and you have no choice but to take them for their word. The only thing you can do on your part is keep your own backups, independent of them.
> he only thing you can do on your part is keep your own backups, independent of them.
That's just common sense. What happens if your hosting company decides to be dicks about some billing dispute and holds your data hostage? Even the if hosting company-powered backups work, you're still hosed without your own backups.
With backups being such a common thing, and something you probably could do but would rather not worry about, I don't see why you wouldn't outsource them.
Simple backups are easy. Understanding when something is sufficiently backed up and how to know whether it is backed up can be quite complex, particularly if large amounts of data is involved.
USB drives work great for a desktop with 1 TB, but not so well for 20TB. Then there is the question of how you know whether everything is sufficiently backed up, whether it is free from corruption, how you will move the backup data to a live server in the event of a restore.
