I’ve had this problem over the years, with managing to execute even a basic DR simulation.  Once I bought some huge external drives to test restores from tape.  By the time I got around to doing the test, the external drives weren’t big enough to do any but the smallest of our restores.  I’ve been fortunate though, and the few real disasters we’ve had were easily recovered from, but I’ve been burned a few times by smaller instances of data loss because of issues that would have been discovered during a DR Simulation. » Read more: Disaster Recovery Simulation